NodeJS 5 KEY Things I Wish I Knew Earlier. | Hacker News Reader

NodeJS 5 KEY Things I Wish I Knew Earlier.

rm2kdev.net

18 pointsrm2kdev19 comments

I'm not even past the introduction and the author has used the terms: NodeJS, NodeJs, and nodejs. This bothers me greatly.

Edit: he also uses the term 'node', has asp.net and ASP.NET. Stuff like this always reflects badly on the author. Makes me think he has poor attention to detail.

Thank you for pointing that out, I did spend quite a while writing this article (more than a few days :P)

As i stated in another reply i am a novice writer and still looking and learning to improve, I've gone back through and fixed up those NodeJS occurrences.

Do you have any good places that i could find more about improving my writing as that would help greatly in the future!

Thanks for reading though i still hope that the core point of my article was useful and not in vein.

Check "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk Jr. It is a classic book on writing style. It's short, inexpensive and very instructive.

Disclaimer: English is not my native language.

Thanks! ill take a look :)

Not sure if you'll ever see this, but it's good that you want to improve, and for this your are entirely forgiven. The only tips I can really give you are to be consistent, and try and be grammatically correct.

I don't care if you use e-mail or email, as long as you stick with the same term. I do care if you use lowercase "i"s when you should be using capital "I"s though.

That being said, everyone can improve, so just keep learning and writing. I have just bought the above book too. Everyone has space to learn. Good job on taking my criticism positively as well, even if I did sound a bit irked.

Ordered the book. Thanks!

These really have nothing to with Node. Point #2 isn't really all that great. You should be learning the core Node APIs if you are going to use Node. Having a fundamental understanding of Streams and EventEmitter will no doubt be useful several times.

Absolutely of course these things matter, but i think the point of the article was to outline what was 'necessary' to begin writing usable decent applications with a proper workflow.

For me urgency in getting up to speed in actually writing a functioning application was of a higher necessity than learning about core node and as part of the learning experience it bummed me out going back to writing hello world examples not getting any 'results' made me want to give it up faster.

also a side note, usually as with most platforms, experience in the higher level results in experimentation lower levels.

Also #3 and #5 are general points too. Especially #5.

Points 3, 4 and 5 don't seem particularly NodeJS specific.

For point 2, as you say, NodeJS is built around packages and has npm bundled for easy dependency management. I'm surprised you didn't bump into this information more quickly as you were researching NodeJS as a technology.

For me, point 1 is the interesting piece of this article; when working with scripting languages, I've always worked with code editors like Sublime Text 2 and Notepad++. I'd be interested to hear more about your use of an IDE; pros / cons - what areas of development you found it improved and where it get in the way.

Fair point. For me points 4 and 5 were part of my nodejs learning experience while your right they are not 'node specific' they are however things that if i had a better understanding of before i began i do believe would have made my initial experience better :)

I may do a more elaborate comparison of IDE's and how they've effected my workflow regarding node in the future thank you for the inspiration there :)

And yeah, looking back i am surprised that i didn't find out about npm and packages earlier on in the game. But yeah for me the learning experience was so fragmented that it was very hard to get a good grip on 'what i needed' and 'what was available' i suppose in the beginning i spent all my time trying to learn the 'core' nodejs without knowing that later i'd spend all my time in 3rd party librarys

Being also an IDE guy I must admit I find also a bit painful to get back to plain text editors. I normally use Eclipse + the JavaScript plugin but mainly because I already have open Eclipse for other projects.

But anyways, I just wanted to point out what will be obvious for many and is that node-inspector is a superb tool for real-time debugging. ( https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector ) No need to go to a full-IDE if the only thing you're missing is that.

Not using version control in a development environment would be reckless. If you hate version control, you're either a bad developer, or you're using the wrong system.

This isn't even a node js article. I want my 2 minutes back please.

Is there any specific points that i could improve on? this article was more or less "The things i wish i knew" when i started node.

What exactly let you down so that i can continue to edit and improve this post going forward?

Kind Regards.

The writing is not that great (maybe because English is not my mother tongue) but the article is an interesting read.

Unfortunately, English is my native language but i spent all my time in school programming and thus now suck at writing haha :) thanks for reading though!

Writing is like any other skill. The more you practice the better you'll get. Keep writing, don't let some of the negative comments discourage you.

Everything here is feedback :) nothing really negative i'll take it and improve my next post hopefully end up with a better result.

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