Distributed Systems with Node.js

Preface

Between the NodeSchool San Francisco and Ann Arbor PHP MySQL groups, I’ve dedicated several years of my life to teaching others how to program. By now I’ve worked with hundreds of students, often starting with the mundane process of installing required software and configuring it. Afterwards, with a little bit of code and a whole lot of explanation, we get to the part where the student’s program runs and it all just “clicks.” I can always tell when it happens: the student smiles and they discuss the possibilities of their newly acquired skill as if it were a power-up in a video game.

My goal is to re-create that tingle of excitement for you, the reader, throughout this book. Within these pages you’ll find many hands-on examples where you get to run various backing services on your development machine and then interact with them using example Node.js application code. With that comes lots of explanation and small tangents to appease the curious.

Once you’re finished with this book, you will have installed and run many different services and, with each of these services, you will have written Node.js application code to interact with them. This book places a greater emphasis on these interactions than it does on examining Node.js application code.

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