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

Visualizing the Node.js execution model

For the chapters that follow it's important to fully understand what it means, conceptually, that a Node.js application has synchronous and asynchronous operations, and how both operations interact with each other.

Let's try to build this understanding step by step.

The first concept that we need to understand is that of the Node.js event loop. The event loop is the execution model of a running Node.js application.

We can visualize this model as a row of loops:

I've drawn boxes because circles look really clumsy in ASCII art. So, these here look like rectangles, but please imagine them as circles - circles with an arrow, which means that one circle represents one iteration through the event loop.

Another visualization could be the following pseudo-code:

while (I still have stuff to do) {
  do stuff;
}

Conceptually, at the very core of it, it's really...