Express in Action

Chapter 2. The basics of Node.js

This chapter covers

• Installing Node.js and using its module system
• Using package.json to describe your project’s metadata
• Using npm to install packages with npm install
• Doing two things at once with Node
• Using Node’s built-in http module to build a simple web server

In chapter 1, we described Node.js, explaining that it’s JavaScript, asynchronous, and has a rich set of third-party modules. If you’re like me, you didn’t totally understand these things when you first started with Node. This chapter aims to give the intro to Node that I wish I had: short and sweet. (From here forward, I’ll refer to Node.js simply as Node.)

Note

I’m assuming that you know a fair bit of JavaScript and that you don’t want ...