Introduction

About Node.js

The aim of this document is to get you started with developing applications with Node.js, teaching you everything you need to know about "advanced" JavaScript along the way. It goes way beyond your typical "Hello World" tutorial.

Status

You are reading the final version of this book, i.e., updates are only done to correct errors or to reflect changes in new versions of Node.js. It was last updated on March 24, 2015.

The code samples in this book are tested to work with Node.js version 0.12.0.

Intended audience

This document will probably fit best for readers that have a background similar to my own: experienced with at least one object-oriented language like Ruby, Python, PHP or Java, only little experience with JavaScript, and completely new to Node.js.

Aiming at developers that already have experience with other programming languages means that this document won't cover really basic stuff like data types, variables, control structures and the likes. You already need to know about these to understand this document.

However, because functions and objects in JavaScript are different from their counterparts in most other languages, these will be explained in more detail.

Structure of this document

Upon finishing this document, you will have created a complete web application which allows the users of this application to view web pages and upload files.

Which, of course, is not exactly world-changing, but we will go some extra miles and not only create the code that is "just enough" to make these use cases possible, but create a simple, yet complete framework to cleanly separate the different aspects of our application. You will see what I mean in a minute.

We will start with looking at how JavaScript development in Node.js is different from JavaScript development in a browser.

Next, we will stay with the good old tradition of writing a "Hello World" application, which is a most basic Node.js application that "does" something.

Then, we will discuss what kind of "real" application we want to build, dissect the different parts which need to be implemented to assemble this application, and start working on each of these parts step-by-step.

As promised, along the way we will learn about some of the more advanced concepts of JavaScript, how to make use of them, and look at why it makes sense to use these concepts instead of those we know from other programming languages.