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What Is Node?
book

What Is Node?

by Brett McLaughlin
July 2011
Beginner content levelBeginner
10 pages
28m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from What Is Node?

Chapter 1. What is Node.js?

Node isn’t always the solution, but it does solve some important problems.

Learning Node might take a little effort, but it’s going to pay off. Why? Because you’re afforded solutions to your web application problems that require only JavaScript to solve.

By Brett McLaughlin

Node.js. It’s the latest in a long line of “Are you cool enough to use me?” programming languages, APIs, and toolkits. In that sense, it lands squarely in the tradition of Rails, and Ajax, and Hadoop, and even to some degree iPhone programming and HTML5. Go to a big technical conference, and you’ll almost certainly find a few talks on Node.js, although most will fly far over the head of the common mortal programmer.

Dig a little deeper, and you’ll hear that Node.js (or, as it’s more briefly called by many, simply “Node”) is a server-side solution for JavaScript, and in particular, for receiving and responding to HTTP requests. If that doesn’t completely boggle your mind, by the time the conversation heats up with discussion of ports, sockets, and threads, you’ll tend to glaze over. Is this really JavaScript? In fact, why in the world would anyone want to run JavaScript outside of a browser, let alone the server?

The good news is that ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449315016Errata Page