Node Lessons

Node Lessons is a series of exercises aimed to learn the basics of NodeJs and Express.

Introduction

Even for experienced Javascript programmers, learning the basics of NodeJs can be tough. The number of guides, tutorials and articles can be overwhelming and, even though after years of crazy and almost hysteric development NodeJs has entered a more mature era of its life, the number of libraries, plugins and frameworks to choose from can leave new users quite disorient.

These lessons act as a guide aimed to explore the potential of Express, the most used framework to build Web Back-ends with NodeJs. Since its low level nature, it will soon become important to rely on various external npm packages to avoid drowning in the complexities of low level Javascript.

The target of this course are Javascript programmers of all experience and level. Nevertheless, it is required a certain understanding of several basic Javascript and general concepts, such as:

Basic array and object manipulation
Promises
CommonJs Javascript module format
Basic understanding of REST APIs
Basic knowledge of MongoDB and Redis

In order to practice with Node Lessons the following software are needed to be installed:

NodeJs v8+
MongoDB server
Redis server

In later lessons, the integration of various Amazon Web Services (AWS) will be presented.

In order to follow these lesson, it is suggested to create a new AWS account to benefit of the initial free tier. Nevertheless, it is possible to incur in some costs (they shouldn't be more than a few euros, if no serious errors are done while experimenting). In any case we do NOT take any responsability for any cost readers could be subject to.

Installation

Just clone the repo and run npm install to install the needed dependencies.

Lessons

The /lessons folder contains the list of lessons of this course. Each lesson contains a readme file with the detailed explanation of the lesson itself and an implemetation of the code required to fulfill the requirements.

Each lesson has an exhaustive description, a list of goals, a list of allowed npm packages, some requirements and a few suggestions.