If you are interested in learning a quick way to get up and running with Node.js, check out the free, online Node.js Beginner Book. The book does a good job of getting you up and running on Node.js as well as helping you understanding blocking and non-blocking IO, event-driven callbacks, routing, and ways to architect and modularize your Node.js applications.
The table of contents includes:
- About
- Status
- Intended audience
- Structure of this document
- JavaScript and Node.js
- JavaScript and You
- A word of warning
- Server-side JavaScript
- "Hello World"
- A full blown web application with Node.js
- The use cases
- The application stack
- Building the application stack
- A basic HTTP server
- Analyzing our HTTP server
- Passing functions around
- How function passing makes our HTTP server work
- Event-driven callbacks
- How our server handles requests
- Finding a place for our server module
- What's needed to "route" requests?
- Execution in the kingdom of verbs
- Routing to real request handlers
- Making the request handlers respond
- How to not do it
- Blocking and non-blocking
- Responding request handlers with non-blocking operations
- Serving something useful
- Handling POST requests
- Handling file uploads
- Conclusion and outlook
The whole Node.js tutorial is on a single HTML Page and can be completed in a couple of hours. Just make sure you have Node.js installed as well as your favorite text editor to start developing Node.js applications.
Read the Node.js Beginner Book here.
David Hayden