This post was originally posted on my blog
In this post, I will just pour my heart about node and what it has to offer. I have broken down the article into a series of questions and answers so that it becomes easy to grasp.
What is Node?
According to the Official site, "Node.js® is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.". In simpler terms, NodeJS is a server-side programming framework, that allows you to write server side code using Javascript. It's open source and free to use. You can install NodeJS on a variety of operating systems, and being Javascript it's very easy to learn too.
Why Node?
With so many different options out there why should you choose it?
There are many reasons for this:
- Easy to install, learn, work with.
- Excellent support for dependency management. Node comes with 'npm', npm allows you to install any dependencies you need. This way setting your code up on any machine is a breeze.
- Good community support. With npm, you have access to loads of packages you can use within your code. If you are stuck with something you will find many people willing to help on Github and Twitter.
- Easy to deploy.
- Asynchronous programming (Initially this will be difficult to grasp, but once you get hang of this you will love it.)
- And finally, Javascript.
What can it do?
With node, you can build different types of applications, scripts, web scrapers, CLI apps, web servers, web application, IOT apps. It has numerous open source packages that will help you get your project moving quickly. Using sockets you can also build an app that needs real-time data. There are libraries that will allow you to fetch data from many data stores, templating engines to build web apps. This way you can build a variety of apps using Node.
How to get started?
So if you are interested to just install NodeJS on your machine,fire up your favorite IDE. If you are on Linux or Mac I would suggest that you use nvm insted. With nvm, you can have multiple node versions installed on your machine and switch between them with easily with just one command. If you are using Windows, you can search for a similar tool online.
That's all I have to say, give NodeJS a try and see for yourself how fun it is. In the next few posts, I will cover important Javascript concepts you should know, tutorials on how to build apps. So stay tuned!
Cover Photo by Patryk Grądys on Unsplash
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