Node.js: Getting Started
By Samer Buna
Course info
Course info
Description
Web and Mobile applications depend on back-end services to host their various resources and do most of the heavy lifting. Creating these back-end services is often very difficult, but the Node.js runtime makes it easier and more fun. In this course, Node.js: Getting Started, you'll learn the basic skills you need to create scalable back-end services with Node.js. First, you'll learn about the tools that come built-in with Node as well as some of the tools that are offered by the community. Next, you'll learn about package management, module dependencies, event-driven concurrency strategies, and how to write code to interface with the operating systems on servers. Finally, you'll discover the modern JavaScript features that you can use with Node.js today. When you're finished with this course, you'll be comfortable creating and executing code for Node.
About the author
Samer Buna is a polyglot coder with years of practical experience in designing, implementing, and testing software, including web and mobile applications development, API design, functional programming, optimization, system administration, databases, and scalability. Samer worked in several industries including real estate, government, education, and publications
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Section Introduction Transcripts
Course Overview
Hello everyone. My name is Samer Buna. I love coding and I love teaching people to code. I work at AgileLabs. com where we create interactive content to help people learn coding. Welcome to this Node. js: Getting Started course from Pluralsight. Node is an amazing runtime. It's simply a game changer. Once I got comfortable working with Node, I never looked back to anything else I used before Node. I'm excited to show you how Node is going to make your life, as a back end developer, so much easier. I mostly write code in this course and you should do too. Learning to code is mostly a practical experience. Try to do and redo the examples I'll present in this course and try to expand their scope, and challenge yourself with every piece of knowledge that you learn. Some of the topics that we will cover in this course include the what, why and how of Node. js, a review of the modern JavaScript concepts, Node's REPL and command line interface, Node's patterns, globals, and utilities, Node's package manager, npm, working with CommonJS modules, Node's concurrency and event loop, working with web servers, and working with the operating system. By the end of this course, you should be comfortable creating and executing code for Node, understand the big pictures of the runtime and build simply back end applications with it. I hope you'll join me on this journey to learn the basics of the excellent Node. js runtime in this Getting Started course at Pluralsight.
Modules and Concurrency
In this module, we're going to talk about two of the core fundamentals of Node. Its modules system, and how to define and require modules using the exports and require objects. And we'll also talk about how Node handles slow operations and allow the execution of many things at once without using any threads, which is a big deal. Let's start with the simple module system and talk about the three important keywords here, the module keyword, the exports keyword, and the require keyword.
Working with the Operating System
One of the common tasks in any backend program is to work with the operation system resources. Read information from the OS and write information to it as well. Node has a few built-in modules that provide some core features around these tasks. There is the OS module for general communication with the OS, and the FS module, which is specific to reading and writing to the OS file system. And there is also the child_processes module that enables you to run any operating system command from within Node. Let's talk about all these three handy modules.