Beginning Node.js 1st ed. Edition

This is a fantastic book. If you're looking for an excellent survey of modern JavaScript development, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy of Beginning Node.js by Basarat Ali Syed.I think my favorite part of the book was Chapter 2, called "Understanding Node.js"; it could have been titled "A brief overview of JavaScript for people who didn't learn it before they started programming in it". This chapter hits all the bases that people need to know about including working with object literals, functions as first-class types, closures, callbacks, truthiness, strict equality, "this", prototype, and try/catch. It's about 24 pages of pure gold - concise and relevant even for people who do only client-side web development. In fact that's a big thing about this book - even if you don't ever intend to use Node.js in production, you will learn so much about JavaScript by reading it, that your time will have been well spent.The rest of the book is also excellent. Basarat has a genuine talent for calling out related concepts that are useful without veering off on tangents from his main message. For example, in the section about NPM, he briefly mentions semver. Knowing about semver is useful for working with NPM, but it's not strictly-speaking a "Node.js" topic; it gets precisely the amount of coverage required, and no more.It's obvious that Basarat knows his stuff and is doing this work every day. He even manages to keep the tone light and fun. One "joke" that I appreciated was his use of the variables "foo", "bar" and "bas" throughout the book ("bas" for Basarat instead of the usual "baz"). The book never gets dull because topics are covered in a level of detail appropriate for beginners but with "gold dust" sprinkled throughout for expert readers.I've been developing JavaScript since the early 2000s, though I have mostly focused on server-side and thick client development on the Microsoft stack (C#/VB/SQL). I learned (or was reminded of) quite a bit throughout. I wish I had read a book like this much earlier in my JavaScript development career. There is a ton of great info in this book, and at 274 pages there is actually a chance that you'll get through the whole thing! I loved it, and wholeheartedly recommend that anyone wishing to learn more about JavaScript in general, or Node.js in particular, read this book.Disclosure: I am a contributor to the grunt-ts TypeScript Grunt plugin project that Basarat started in 2013, and we've interacted quite a bit on GitHub, Twitter, and Stack Overflow. We've never met, or even spoken, but I do consider him a friend and a person I respect. Given our relationship, I did my best to review this book objectively. If it had sucked, I simply would have not reviewed it. In fact, it was even better than I expected and I really can't recommend it enough.

This is a good book for introducing readers to Node.js and presenting topics for further investigation. The philosophy of Node.js is explained, along with the package manager and file versioning. Popular add-ons like express.js, angular.js, react.js, mongoDB/mongoose, node-inspector, mocha, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are all presented. The refresher sections for javascript and JSON are elegantly written, providing just enough information for both new and experienced programmers.Less-experienced programmers should read supplementary material before developing Node.js applications. Most of the examples print out strings to the console window, and attentive readers will realize there's more to mongoDB, angular.js, and callbacks than what's presented in the book. I wish the callback chapter was a little more explicit about the expected output from the examples. The callback text can also be confusing in places, particularly when comparing promises to callbacks.Some of the code samples feature deprecated calls (the mongoose section is out-of-date), which is reasonable considering the book was written 3 years ago. One of Apress's editors contacted me when I submitted my errata notes. I'll award this book 4 out of 5 stars, because the deprecated code and the chapter on callbacks required some time for me to puzzle out what the author meant.

I would have to say some basic OOP programming knowledge is required to fully grasp what's going on in this book. It assumes that you have little to no JS experience, so it does bring you up to speed on that, which I found helpful with myself having no JS experience. It would be nice though if there were some sample problems at the end of each chapter to really nail home what was learned in each chapter. Can't wait to do the next one. :)**editJust hit chapt. 6 (getting started with http) and I would have to say it would be more helpful if they stepped through the code and did some explanation of what the npm functions did exactly.

This is a perfect book for beginners - exactly what I was looking for. I'm a front end JS developer with limited server-side experience. This book walked me through the foundation principles of Node.js and gave me a good start to build from. It's clearly written with many good examples and diagrams, and easy to understand without advanced JS knowledge. I wouldn't say it gave me everything I need to go be a Node developer - it really just lays out the basics. That's all it promised and all I expected – and on that it delivered. I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting to dip their toes into the Node pond.