Don’t get swallowed by a whale, start with the basics.

This tutorial is for those developers who want to get started with Node.js, but have no idea where to start.

What is Node.js ?

The official webpage for Node.js defines Node.js as

As an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime, Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications.

Quite scary, eh?!

Node.js ACTUALLY is..

• A platform which allows us to run JavaScript on a computer/server
• Read, delete and update files, and
• Easily communicate with a database

Node.js was originally created by Ryan Dahl, who was later joined by Joyent's Ben Noordhuis and Yehuda Katz. It was officially launched on November 14, 2008, at the Node.js Interactive conference.

Why would you want to use Node.js?

Node.js is written in JavaScript, allowing web developers to easily develop fast, scalable network applications using the tools they already know.

Node.js is fast because it runs on the V8 engine, and it uses non-blocking code so that the program can run in multiple threads.

It has a huge ecosystem of open source packages and tools that enable you to do more in less time.

Node.js is cross-platform and available on Linux, OS X, Windows, and FreeBSD.

Ready to learn?

In order to follow along with the provided examples throughout these blogs, you should have..

• General understanding of JavaScript or TypeScript,

• A bit of markup with HTML5 and

• Command line/Terminal usage

Alright, let's get started.