Web Development with Node and Express: Leveraging the JavaScript Stack

Ethan Brown

Jul 2014 · "O'Reilly Media, Inc."

About this ebook

Learn how to build dynamic web applications with Express, a key component of the Node/JavaScript development stack. In this hands-on guide, author Ethan Brown teaches you the fundamentals through the development of a fictional application that exposes a public website and a RESTful API. You’ll also learn web architecture best practices to help you build single-page, multi-page, and hybrid web apps with Express.

Express strikes a balance between a robust framework and no framework at all, allowing you a free hand in your architecture choices. With this book, frontend and backend engineers familiar with JavaScript will discover new ways of looking at web development.

• Create webpage templating system for rendering dynamic data
• Dive into request and response objects, middleware, and URL routing
• Simulate a production environment for testing and development
• Focus on persistence with document databases, particularly MongoDB
• Make your resources available to other programs with RESTful APIs
• Build secure apps with authentication, authorization, and HTTPS
• Integrate with social media, geolocation, and other third-party services
• Implement a plan for launching and maintaining your app
• Learn critical debugging skills

  This book covers Express 4.0.

Ratings and reviews

This book spends far too much time on things that are not Node.js and Express. If you are looking for a Node/Express-centric book, keep on looking. If you are looking to learn how to use Handlebars templates, Grunt for build, Mocha/Chai for testing, and other generic Javascript development topics, then maybe this book is for you. But for my money - and time - I wanted something that got down to the business of building a Node app with Express. This book doesn't do that, in spite of its title.

About the author

Ethan Brown is a senior software engineer at Pop Art, a Portland-based interactive marketing agency, where he is responsible for the architecture and implementation of web sites and web services for clients ranging from small businesses to international enterprise companies. He has over twenty years of programming experience, from embedded to the web, and has embraced the JavaScript stack as the web platform of the future.