About
The aim of this document is to get you started with developing applications for Node. js, teaching you everything you need to know about “advanced” JavaScript along the way. It goes way beyond your typical “Hello World” tutorial.
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.
JavaScript and Node. js
JavaScript and You
Before we talk about all the technical stuff, let’s take a moment and talk about you and your relationship with JavaScript. This chapter is here to allow you to estimate if reading this document any further makes sense for you.
If you are like me, you started with HTML “development” long ago, by writing HTML documents. You came along this funny thing called JavaScript, but you only used it in a very basic way, adding interactivity to your web pages every now and then.
What you really wanted was “the real thing”, you wanted to know how to build complex web sites – you learned a programming language like PHP, Ruby, Java, and started writing “backend” code.
Nevertheless, you kept an eye on JavaScript, you saw that with the introduction of jQuery, Prototype and the likes, things got more advanced in JavaScript land, and that this language really was about more than window. open().
However, this was all still frontend stuff, and although it was nice to have jQuery at your disposal whenever you felt like spicing up a web page, at the end of the day you were, at best, a JavaScript user, but not a JavaScript developer.
And then came Node. js. JavaScript on the server, how cool is that?
You decided that it’s about time to check out the old, new JavaScript. But wait, writing Node.
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