In this chapter, we took time to make sure your development environment was properly configured with both the Node runtime environment as well as the MongoDB server. After making sure both were properly installed, we wrote a basic app that utilized both technologies.

The app connected to a locally running MongoDB server, checked for the existence of a specific set of data, and if it wasn't found, sample records were inserted automatically. It then retrieved those same records and displayed them to the screen, which were sorted alphabetically.

Now that the tedious but necessary tasks of set up and installation are out of the way, we can move on to some fun and get started with learning! In the next chapter, we will review a primer on the JavaScript language and understand the basics of Node. Then, we will review basic Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations with MongoDB using the mongo shell.