Book Image

Modern Frontend Development with Node.js

By : Florian Rappl
5 (1)
Book Image

Modern Frontend Development with Node.js

5 (1)
By: Florian Rappl

Overview of this book

Almost a decade after the release of Node.js, the tooling used by frontend developers is fully embracing this cross-platform JavaScript runtime, which is sadly often limited to server-side web development. This is where this Node.js book comes in, showing you what this popular runtime has to offer and how you can unlock its full potential to create frontend-focused web apps. You’ll begin by learning the basics and internals of Node.js, before discovering how to divide your code into modules and packages. Next, you’ll get to grips with the most popular package managers and their uses and find out how to use TypeScript and other JavaScript variants with Node.js. Knowing which tool to use when is crucial, so this book helps you understand all the available state-of-the-art tools in Node.js. You’ll interact with linters such as ESLint and formatters such as Prettier. As you advance, you’ll become well-versed with the Swiss Army Knife for frontend developers – the bundler. You’ll also explore various testing utilities, such as Jest, for code quality verification. Finally, you’ll be able to publish your code in reusable packages with ease. By the end of this web development book, you’ll have gained the knowledge to confidently choose the right code structure for your repositories with all that you’ve learned about monorepos.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Part 1: Node.js Fundamentals
5
Part 2: Tooling
10
Part 3: Advanced Topics

Summary

In this chapter, we discovered Node.js for the first time. You should now have a good idea of the core principles (such as event loop, threads, modules, and packages) upon which Node.js was built. You have read a bit about Node.js’s history and why V8 was chosen as the JavaScript engine.

One of the key things to take away from this chapter is how the event loop works. Note that part of this knowledge is not exclusive to Node.js. The distinction between micro tasks and tasks is an integral part of how JavaScript engines, even the JavaScript engine of your browser, work.

Lastly, you are now equipped to use the node command-line application, for example, to run or debug simple scripts, which can export and import functionality using the CommonJS module system. You learned how to use the Chrome web browser to inspect Node.js scripts as you can with websites.

In the next chapter, we will increase our knowledge about CommonJS by learning how we can efficiently divide code into modules and packages.