Why don't the AngularJS docs use a dot in the model directive?

That little dot is very important when dealing with the complexities of scope inheritance.

The egghead.io video "The Dot" has a really good overview, as does this very popular stack overflow question: What are the nuances of scope prototypal / prototypical inheritance in AngularJS?

I'll try to summarize it here:

Angular.js uses scope inheriting to allow a child scope (such as a child controller) to see the properties of the parent scope. So, let's say you had a setup like:

<div ng-controller="ParentCtrl">
    <input type="text" ng-model="foo"/>
    <div ng-controller="ChildCtrl">
        <input type="text" ng-model="foo"/>
    </div>
</div>

(Play along on a JSFiddle)

At first, if you started the app, and typed into the parent input, the child would update to reflect it.

However, if you edit the child scope, the connection to the parent is now broken, and the two no longer sync up. On the other hand, if you use ng-model="baz.bar", then the link will remain.

The reason this happens is because the child scope uses prototypical inheritance to look up the value, so as long as it never gets set on the child, then it will defer to the parent scope. But, once it's set, it no longer looks up the parent.

When you use an object (baz) instead, nothing ever gets set on the child scope, and the inheritance remains.

For more in-depth details, check out the StackOverflow answer

Dot will be required when you prototypically inherit one scope from another for example in case of ng-repeat a new scope is created for every line item which prototypically inherits from parent scope. In the basic example there is no prototype inheritance since there is only one scope but if you have a number of child scopes then you will start facing the problem. The link below will make everything clear.

https://github.com/angular/angular.js/wiki/Understanding-Scopes#ng-repeat