Book Image

Node Cookbook

By : David Mark Clements
Book Image

Node Cookbook

By: David Mark Clements

Overview of this book

The principles of asynchronous event-driven programming are perfect for today's web, where efficient real-time applications and scalability are at the forefront. Server-side JavaScript has been here since the 90's but Node got it right. With a thriving community and interest from Internet giants, it could be the PHP of tomorrow. "Node Cookbook" shows you how to transfer your JavaScript skills to server side programming. With simple examples and supporting code, "Node Cookbook" talks you through various server side scenarios often saving you time, effort, and trouble by demonstrating best practices and showing you how to avoid security faux pas. Beginning with making your own web server, the practical recipes in this cookbook are designed to smoothly progress you to making full web applications, command line applications, and Node modules. Node Cookbook takes you through interfacing with various database backends such as MySQL, MongoDB and Redis, working with web sockets, and interfacing with network protocols, such as SMTP. Additionally, there are recipes on correctly performing heavy computations, security implementations, writing, your own Node modules and different ways to take your apps live.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Node Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introduction


When it comes to production web servers, security is paramount. The importance of security correlates with the importance of the data or services we provide. But even for the smallest projects, we want to ensure our systems aren't vulnerable to attack.

Many web development frameworks provide built-in security, which is a two-sided coin. On one side, we don't have to overly concern ourselves with the details (except for the basics, like cleaning user input before passing it into an SQL statement), but on the other we implicitly trust that the vendor has plugged all the holes.

If a largely used server-side scripting platform, such as PHP, is discovered to contain a security vulnerability, this can become public knowledge very quickly and every site running the vulnerable version of that framework is open to attack.

With Node, server-side security is almost entirely on our shoulders. Therefore, all we need to do is educate ourselves on the potential vulnerabilities and harden our...