Book Image

Mastering Node.js

By : Sandro Pasquali
Book Image

Mastering Node.js

By: Sandro Pasquali

Overview of this book

Node.js is a modern development stack focused on providing an easy way to build scalable network software. Backed by a growing number of large companies and a rapidly increasing developer base, Node is revolutionizing the way that software is being built today. Powered by Google's V8 engine and built out of C++ modules, this is a JavaScript environment for the enterprise.Mastering Node.js will take the reader deep into this exciting development environment. Beginning with a comprehensive breakdown of its innovative non-blocking evented design, Node's structure is explained in detail, laying out how its blazingly fast I/O performance simplifies the creation of fast servers, scalable architectures, and responsive web applications.Mastering Node.js takes you through a concise yet thorough tour of Node's innovative evented non-blocking design, showing you how to build professional applications with the help of detailed examples.Learn how to integrate your applications with Facebook and Twitter, Amazon and Google, creating social apps and programs reaching thousands of collaborators on the cloud. See how the Express and Path frameworks make the creation of professional web applications painless. Set up one, two, or an entire server cluster with just a few lines of code, ready to scale as soon as you're ready to launch. Move data seamlessly between databases and file systems, between clients, and across network protocols, using a beautifully designed, consistent, and predictable set of tools.Mastering Node.js contains all of the examples and explanations you'll need to build applications in a short amount of time and at a low cost, running on a scale and speed that would have been nearly impossible just a few years ago.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Mastering Node.js
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Native Node testing and debugging tools


A preference for tested code has formed part of the Node community's ethos since its inception, reflected in the fact that most popular Node modules, even simple ones, are distributed with test suites. While browser-side development with JavaScript suffered for many years without usable testing tools, the relatively young Node distribution contains many. Perhaps because of this, many mature and easy to use third-party testing frameworks have been developed for Node. This leaves a developer no excuse for writing untested code! Let's look into some of the provided tools for debugging and testing Node programs.

Writing to the console

Console output is the most basic testing and debugging tool, providing a quick way to see what is happening at some point in a script. The globally accessible console.log is commonly used when debugging.

Node has enriched this standard output mechanism with more useful methods, such as console.error(String, String…), which prints...