Great Node.js: Taking JavaScript All the Way

Written by Guillermo Rauch, the creator of Socket.IO, this is an introductory and hands-on book on Node.js distinguished by its learning-by-doing approach. The book is divided into five main parts: Node's core design philosophy, the APIs of Node's core modules, web development, databases, and testing. It opens with installation on various platforms, the use of NPM, and JavaScript language features, then analyzes Node's underlying ideas such as blocking and non-blocking I/O, the event loop, the single-threaded model, and the module system; it goes on to explain the basics of network programming through examples including command-line tools and the fs file API, a TCP chat program and an IRC client, and an HTTP server and web client. The web development section introduces Connect middleware, the Express framework, HTML5 WebSocket, and Socket.IO in turn, linking the knowledge points through real-time application cases such as chat rooms and multi-user collaboration. The database section combines MongoDB (including Mongoose), MySQL (node-mysql and sequelize), and Redis to demonstrate data persistence and query modeling. The final chapter discusses sharing code between front end and back end and automated testing based on Mocha and expect.js. The book includes numerous full-color illustrations and runnable code examples, aiming to take readers from environment setup all the way to a complete working application.