Learn Node.js: A free interactive course for Node beginners

For the speedy first 1,000 we also have free copies of The Node Beginner Book in PDF/ePub/Mobi to giveaway: https://hyperdev.com/help/free-copy-node-beginner-book/

There are two situations where I'd start another project in Node.js:

1) there's an unusual amount of logic shared between browser and server

2) a web layer needs to be isomorphic

Node hits a sweet spot for these, but it's not my choice any more for non-web servers like the micro-services that back up mobile and single page apps.

I abandon Node.js after a first project years ago because of the callback soup. I came back when promises promised an alternative. Now I run into situations where promises cascade up from a few async calls and affect every API built on top of them. Perhaps async/await will improve the situation.

I'm curious where Node.js fits for other people.

HyperDev is definitely a service to watch.

I spent a lot of time with Docker in its early days, and now I work a lot with documentation. I dream of providing my readers with live, on-demand sandboxes they can use to play with our sample code before trying to run it locally.

Lots of services have cropped up in recent years to try and make this dream a reality. Unfortunately, most either require user registration or are defunct, and I suspect it's because preventing abuse and fraud are extremely difficult.

HyperDev is by far the best attempt I've seen yet. It's functional, doesn't require user registration, and provides a full URL I can use with other web APIs.

They're Node-only for now, but they're teasing more languages on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HyperDevIt/status/771766515603533829

I'm certainly rooting for them.

I think this course can be helpful.

However, it may be challenging to build a full application based only on what you find in this book. I strongly recommend to get familiar with lodash, bluebird, jsdoc and learn to organize your code before writing web servers.

node is not a fuzzy warm friendly technology. Unlike web browsers in which your JavaScript is fully sandboxed and babyproofed, node is not. And many people learning node today do not learn what the event loop is, and how it is YOUR responsibility to not block it.

The golden rule of learning node is: trial and error might be fine while learning, but not for professional work. If you reach a point in which things seem to work, FORCE YOU TO UNDERSTAND WHY IT IS WORKING. If you don't follow this simple rule you will get yourself into REAL problems.

Another interactive (in the commandline) tutorial series on various nodejs topics, beginner & advanced, is http://nodeschool.io/#workshopper-list

I worked through the Node Beginner Book by Manuel Kiessling some years ago and enjoyed it. I'll probably look through it again to see what has changed. But I'm increasingly (and approaching permanently) disillusioned with the Node/js space.

Not due to the language complaints alone from yesteryear. Rather left-pad and this, https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/712624914071728128.

It just seems like a real mess. In general tooling needs more work than anything, for all languages but JS is a good conversation piece on what's wrong.

I understand this is just a dummy example, but to make the code easier to read and understand you should inline functions that are only used once, unless it has a lot of reusability. There's a fine line between abstraction and obscurity.

Hey, thanks for sharing. Super helpful!