What this book covers
Chapter 1, The Node.js Platform, serves as an introduction to the world of Node.js application design by showing the patterns at the core of the platform itself. It covers the Node.js ecosystem and its philosophy, and provides a quick introduction to the Node.js internals and the reactor pattern.
Chapter 2, The Module System, dives into the module systems available in Node.js, underlining the differences between CommonJS and the more modern ES modules from the ECMAScript 2015 specification.
Chapter 3, Callbacks and Events, introduces the first steps towards learning asynchronous coding and its patterns, discussing and comparing callbacks and the event emitter (observer pattern).
Chapter 4, Asynchronous Control Flow Patterns with Callbacks, introduces a set of patterns and techniques for efficiently handling asynchronous control flow in Node.js using callbacks. This chapter teaches you some traditional ways to mitigate the "callback hell" problem using plain JavaScript.
Chapter 5, Asynchronous Control Flow Patterns with Promises and Async/Await, progresses with the exploration of more sophisticated and modern asynchronous control flow techniques.
Chapter 6, Coding with Streams, dives deep into one of the most important tools in Node.js: streams. It shows you how to process data with transform streams and how to combine them into different patterns.
Chapter 7, Creational Design Patterns, starts to explore the traditional design patterns in Node.js. In this chapter, you will learn about some of the most popular creational design patterns, namely the Factory pattern, the Revealing Constructor pattern, the Builder pattern, and the Singleton pattern.
Chapter 8, Structural Design Patterns, continues the exploration of traditional design patterns in Node.js, covering structural design patterns such as Proxy, Decorator, and Adapter.
Chapter 9, Behavioral Design Patterns, concludes the conversation around traditional design patterns in Node.js by introducing behavioral design patterns like Strategy, State, Template, Middleware, Command, and Iterator.
Chapter 10, Universal JavaScript for Web Applications, explores one of the most interesting capabilities of modern JavaScript web applications: being able to share code between the frontend and the backend. Throughout this chapter, you will learn the basic principles of Universal JavaScript by building a simple web application using modern tools and libraries.
Chapter 11, Advanced Recipes, takes a problem-solution approach to show you how some common coding and design intricacies can be approached with ready-to-use solutions.
Chapter 12, Scalability and Architectural Patterns, teaches you the basic techniques and patterns for scaling a Node.js application.
Chapter 13, Messaging and Integration Patterns, presents the most important messaging patterns, teaching you how to build and integrate complex distributed systems using Node.js and its ecosystem.