You learned a lot in this chapter. Specifically, you saw that JavaScript has a life outside web browsers and that Node.js is an excellent programming platform with many interesting attributes. While it is a relatively young project, Node.js has become very popular and is widely used not just for web applications but for command-line developer tools and much more. Because the Node.js platform is based on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, the project has been able to keep up with the rapid improvements to the JavaScript language.
The Node.js architecture consists of asynchronous functions managed by an event loop triggering callback functions, rather than using threads and blocking I/O. This architecture has claimed performance benefits that seem to offer many benefits, including the ability to do more work with less hardware. But we also learned that inefficient algorithms can erase any performance benefits.
Our focus in this book is the real-world considerations of developing and deploying Node.js applications. We'll cover as many aspects of developing, refining, testing, and deploying Node.js applications as we can.
Now that we've had this introduction to Node.js, we're ready to dive in and start using it. In Chapter 2, Setting up Node.js, we'll go over how to set up a Node.js development environment on Mac, Linux, or Windows, and even write some code. So let's get started.