Web Development with Node and Express

Chapter 23. Additional Resources

In this book, I have tried to give you a comprehensive overview of building websites with Express. And we have covered a remarkable amount of ground, but we’ve still only scratched the surface of the packages, techniques, and frameworks that are available to you. In this chapter, we’ll discuss where you can go for additional resources.

Online Documentation

For JavaScript, CSS, and HTML documentation, the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) is without equal. If I need JavaScript documentation, I either search directly on MDN or append “mdn” to my search query. Otherwise, inevitably, w3schools appears in the search. Whoever is managing SEO for w3schools is a genius, but I recommend avoiding this site: I find the documentation is often severely lacking.

Where MDN is a great HTML reference, if you’re new to HTML5 (or even if you’re not), you should read Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5. WHATWG maintains an excellent “living standard” HTML5 specification; it is usually where I turn to first for really hard-to-answer HTML questions. Finally, the official specifications for HTML and CSS are located on the W3C website; they are dry, difficult-to-read documents, but sometimes it’s your only recourse for the very hardest problems.

JavaScript adheres to the ECMA-262 ECMAScript language specification. Information about the next version of JavaScript, called ES6 (codenamed Harmony) can be found at http://bit.ly/es6_harmony. To track the availability of ES6 features in ...