Node.js The Right Way

Let me start with an embarrassing confession. Up to now, I’ve built a handful of Node.js apps. But the whole time, I never actually studied Node.js. I never read a single book, never watched an online course. It’s all just JavaScript, which I already know, right? And there’s so much else I need to study, so why bother? That was pretty much my thinking. But not long ago, when a Node.js app that I’d put real effort into didn’t behave the way I expected, I started to change my mind. More than anything, when I dug into the open source libraries I’d been borrowing, their coding style was very different from mine. I felt I couldn’t go on like this. And so the book I picked up was this very one, ‘Node.js the Right Way’.

It’s hard for me to evaluate the book’s content at my level. I’m ignorant, and I’ve only now read a single book about Node.js. But in the sense that it dealt with asynchrony and callbacks, and the process of robustly handling the errors that can arise from them, it became an opportunity to relieve a good deal of the frustration I’d felt while using Node.js all this time. It also has the virtue of being thin and light, so that you can somehow read it from beginning to end. That said, it’s not a book that’s merely easy. It’s just that there’s no fluff (?) in the explanations. So there were parts I had to read over and over, several times. And finally coming to realize what it was that I hadn’t understood, through that process, is a truly enjoyable experience. As I always feel, the road ahead really is long.

2018.11.05

JIM R. Wilson. 2015. Node.js the Right Way. Supervised by Lee Jang-won. Hongneung Science Publishing.