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

Using npm

When you install Node.js from the official sources, you get a bit more than just Node.js. For convenience, Node.js will also add a few more programs and settings to your system. One of the most important additions is a tool called npm. Originally, npm was intended to stand for Node.js Package Manager, but today, it is essentially its own standalone name.

The goal of npm is to allow developers to manage third-party dependencies. This includes installing and updating packages, as well as handling their versioning and transitive dependencies. A transitive dependency is established when dependencies that are installed also include dependencies, which therefore need to be installed, too.

For npm to know what dependencies exist and what their dependencies are, the npm registry was created. It is a web service that hosts all packages on a file server.

Changing the used npm registry

Today, many npm registries exist – but only the official one located at https:...