Book Image

Learning Node.js for .NET Developers

Book Image

Learning Node.js for .NET Developers

Overview of this book

Node.js is an open source, cross-platform runtime environment that allows you to use JavaScript to develop server-side web applications. This short guide will help you develop applications using JavaScript and Node.js, leverage your existing programming skills from .NET or Java, and make the most of these other platforms through understanding the Node.js programming model. You will learn how to build web applications and APIs in Node, discover packages in the Node.js ecosystem, test and deploy your Node.js code, and more. Finally, you will discover how to integrate Node.js and .NET code.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Learning Node.js for .NET Developers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Writing npm packages


If you create some code that would be useful to others, you can distribute it as an npm package. To demonstrate this, we'll implement some slightly more complex functionality.

Note

You can find the example code for this section at https://github.com/NodeJsForDevelopers/autotoc. Note that, unlike previous chapters, there is not one per commit per heading. The listings in the rest of this section match the final version of the code.

We're going to implement a tool for generating a table of contents (ToC) by crawling a website. To help with this, we'll make use of a few other npm packages:

  • request provides an API for making HTTP requests, which is higher-level and much simpler to use than the build in the Node.js http module

  • cheerio provides jQuery-like HTML traversal outside of the browser environment

  • denodeify, mentioned in Chapter 8, Mastering Asynchronicity, allows us to use the request library with promises instead of callbacks

Tip

It's common for npm packages to depend...