Chapter 1, Making a Web Server, covers serving dynamic and static content, caching files in memory, streaming large files straight from disk over HTTP, and securing your web server.

Chapter 2, Exploring the HTTP Object, explains receiving and processing POST requests and file uploads, using Node as an HTTP client, and discusses how to throttle downloads.

Chapter 3, Working with Data Serialization, explains how to convert data from your apps into XML and JSON formats for sending to the browser or third-party APIs.

Chapter 4, Interfacing with Databases, covers how to implement persistent data stores with Redis, CouchDB, MongoDB, MySQL, or plain CSV files.

Chapter 5, Transcending AJAX: Using WebSockets, helps you to make real-time web apps with modern browser WebSocket technology, gracefully degrade to long-polling and other methods with Socket.io.

Chapter 6, Accelerating Development with Express, explains how to leverage the Express framework to achieve rapid web development. It also covers using template languages and CSS engines, such as LESS and Stylus.

Chapter 7, Implementing Security, Encryption, and Authentication, explains how to set up an SSL secured web server, use the crypto module to create strong password hashes, and protect your users from cross-site request forgery attacks.

Chapter 8, Integrating Network Paradigms, discusses sending emails and creating your own email server, sending SMS text messages, implementing virtual hosting, and doing fun and interesting things with raw TCP.

Chapter 9, Writing Your Own Node Modules explains how to create a test suite, write a solution, refactor, improve and extend, and then deploy your own Node module.

Chapter 10, Taking It Live discusses how to deploy your web apps to a live server, ensure your apps stay live with crash recovery techniques, implement a continuous deployment work flow, or alternatively simply use a Platform as a Service Provider.

Will continue to be relevant on Node's 1.x.x release

If you have some knowledge of JavaScript and want to build fast, efficient, scalable client-server solutions, then Node Cookbook is for you. Experienced users of Node will improve their skills, and even if you have not worked with Node before, these practical recipes will make it easy to get started.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: " In order to create the server we need the http module."

A block of code is set as follows:

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (request, response) {
response.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/html'});
response.end('Woohoo!');
}).listen(8080);

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

var http = require('http');
var path = require('path');

http.createServer(function (request, response) {
var lookup=path.basename(decodeURI(request.url));

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo npm -g install express

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "We could make it possible for a hypothetical user to indicate if they were inspired by a quote, such as a Like button."

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