Introduction
Node is a great thing to learn an easy way to execute and work with JavaScript on the server. Node comes with some feature-rich, built-in modules. This makes it a great platform for tools, not a platform to host backend servers.
So, when you write JavaScript from Node, Node will pass your JavaScript to VM will execute that JavaScript and tell Node what the result is. and Node will make the result available to you. But Node is a bit more useful than that. Besides the fact that enables us to execute JavaScript on a server, which through seamless integration with V8. Node comes with some handy built-in modules providing rich features through easy to use asynchronous APIs.
Node is a big framework with many built-in modules and concepts which you need to learn, but they require much longer time and bigger effort. so step by step we’ll understand modules in the node.
First, we’ll go over some of the core features in Node and how to execute scripts and work with the command line. Then we’ll understand the review of the modern features in JavaScript that you can execute in your Node. js. After that, we’ll learn Node’s package manager, NPM.
Why Node Popular?
The simplest definition of Node, it’s JavaScript on your backend servers. Before Nodejs, that was not a common or easy thing to do. JavaScript was a frontend thing. This isn’t a complete definition because Node offers a lot more than executing JavaScript on the server. In fact, the execution of JavaScript on the server is not done by Node at all, it’s done with a virtual machine, VM like V8 or Chakra. Node is the coordinator, it’s the one who instructs a VM like V8 to execute your JavaScript. So Node is better defined as a wrapper around a VM like V8.
We can do asynchronous programming in Node, do things in parallel, without needing to deal with threads. which is the biggest benefit of using a runtime like Nodejs. And if the built-in packages were not enough for you, you can build highly-performing packages using C++. Node is JavaScript, but it has first class support for C++ add-ons, creating dynamically linked shared objects that you can use directly in Node.
The node also has some handy generic utilities that enhance the JavaScript language and provide extra APIs to work with, data types. So Nodejs is a great platform for tools and the reason it’s great because you have a lot of options. You have so many tools out there because Node was the first major JavaScript execution engine that ships with a reliable node package manager.
NPM Support
NPM is the world’s largest collection of free and reusable code. You can make a feature-rich Node application by using code that’s freely available on NPM. Npm is a reliable package manager, which comes with a CLI that we’re going to explore and that CLI makes it easy to install third-party packages and, in general, share your own code and reuse your own code.
Node comes with first-class support and easy APIs for many asynchronous operations, like reading and writing files, consuming data over the network, and even compressing and encrypting data. You can do all the operations in Node asynchronously without blocking the main execution thread.
Node asynchronous APIs also work great for cloud applications in general because a lot of these operations are asynchronous by nature. by using Nodejs, you are committing to the flexible JavaScript language, which is used on every website today. It is the most popular programming language.
In the Node we build simple, small, single process, nodes, building blocks, that can organize with good networking protocols. to have them communicate with each other and scale up to build large distributed programs.
How to Install Node?
Follow the step by step instructions on how to install Node.
To install Node on Windows, you can simply download the installer from the nodejs.org website and run it locally.
There’s another option that works on both Mac and Linux, and that is nvm, Node version manager. I like this option because it allows you to run multiple versions of Node and switch between them using a simple command. If you find yourself in a situation where you need to work on a project that uses different versions of Node, nvm will help you here.
Linux, Mac and other platforms
If you’ve successfully installed Node, you should see the following three commands available globally in your system. First, the node command itself, which if you run it without any argument, you’ll get into this interactive program where you can type and execute JavaScript.
— $ node
> 1 + 3
4
> 1 + ( 2 * 3 ) - 4
3If this line was executed successfully without any errors, as it did for me here, you have a good version of Node. If you get an error here, you should upgrade your Node.
You can also test if your Nodejs has the new promises APIs using these two calls in here. Util. promising should return a function like this and require fs. promises should return an object of the full fs API, like this.
