Review of the book Node for Front-End Developers by Garann Means

★★★★★ (5 stars out of 5)

The book Node for Front-End Developers by Garann Means presents a great introduction to Node and its surrounding modules.

Not only is using the same language for both client-side and server-side awesome, but Node itself is fast, stable and production ready. Node was first created by Ryan Dahl and is built using Google’s V8 JavaScript Engine.

The book is nicely organized and lightly touches everything you’d want to have when starting with a new web framework. If you haven’t done a ton of web development, you’ll get lots of introductory bits on things to learn such as the key-value store Redis.

The following topics (and more) are covered:

• Setting up Node and Node Package Manager (NPM)
• Testing with command line
• Serving static content
• Serving dynamic content
• URL routing
• Handling HTTP POST data
• Handling AJAX requests w/ JSON and JSONP
• Using node.js with HTML5 websockets (very cool!)
• Server side templates, passing server side data to templates
• Partial templates
• Working with persistent storage
• Working with files
• MVC pattern

You won’t go deep into any one topic; however, the book gives you just enough information to know where to go from there. I’d recommend this book to anyone with some JavaScript experience that wants to know what Node is all about.