Chapter 1. Welcome to Node.js

This chapter covers

  • What Node.js is
  • JavaScript on the server
  • The asynchronous and evented nature of Node
  • Types of applications Node is designed for
  • Sample Node programs

So what is Node.js? It’s likely you’ve heard the term. Maybe you already use Node. Maybe you’re curious about it. At this point in time, Node is very popular and young (it debuted in 2009). It’s the second-most-watched project on GitHub (https://github.com/joyent/node), it has quite a following in its Google group (http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs) and IRC channel (http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=node.js), and it has more than 15,000 community modules published in NPM, the package manager (http://npmjs.org). All this to say,

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