Book Image

The Node Craftsman Book

By : Manuel Kiessling
Book Image

The Node Craftsman Book

By: Manuel Kiessling

Overview of this book

The Node Craftsman Book helps JavaScript programmers with basic Node.js knowledge to now thoroughly master Node.js and JavaScript. This book dives you deeper into the craft of software development with Node.js and JavaScript, incuding object-orientation, test-driven development, database handling, web frameworks, and much more. The Node Craftsman Book shows you how to work with Node.js and how to think deeply about how you build your Node projects. You'll master how to build a complete Node.js application across six crafting milestones, and you'll learn many specific skills to achieve that mastery. These skills include how to work with the Node Package Manager in depth, how to connect your Node applications to databases, and how to write unit tests and end-to-end tests for your code. You'll experience the full Node.js development picture, and learn how to craft and control your Node.js applications - right through to fully-fledged web applications using REST, and integration with Angular applications.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: Node.js Basics in Detail
2
Working with NPM and Packages
3
Test-driven Node.js Development
11
Milestone 1 – A First Passing Test Against the Server
13
Milestone 3 – Setting the Stage for a Continuous Delivery Workflow

Creating objects

Let's dive into code a bit, shall we? How could we set up our code in order to allow us to create our myCar object, ending up with an object that is a Car and can therefore honk and drive?

Well, in the most simple sense, we can create our object completely from scratch, or ex nihilo if you prefer the boaster expression.

It works like this:

var myCar = {};

myCar.honk = function() {
  console.log('honk honk');
};

myCar.drive = function() {
  console.log('vrooom...');
};

This gives us an object called myCar that is able to honk and drive:

myCar.honk(); // outputs "honk honk"
myCar.drive(); // outputs "vrooom..."

However, if we were to create 30 cars this way, we would end up defining the honk and drive behaviour of every single one, something we said we want to avoid.

In real life, if we made a living out of creating, say, pencils, and we don't...