Learn Node.js - Part 1

Node.js

This series is my notes when learning Node.js.

We will focus on fundenmental concepts of Node.js in this post.

Node.js

As what it says on the official website, Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine. Let's first look at several keywords here.

  • JavaScript runtime: It refers to the environment where your JavaScript codes are executed. Runtime provides some objects/utilities, e.g. built-in APIs and filesystem access functionality, to JavaScript so that it can interact with the outside world.
  • Chrome V8: It is a free and open-source JavaScript engine developed by Chromium Project. The engine translates JavaScript to runnable machine codes so that is can be executed by the CPU. The V8 engine is used in Node.js runtime.

Characteristics

  • Single-threaded, which means it won't create a new thread for every request. However, with this feature, Node.js is not suitable for handling CPU intensive operations.
  • Non-blocking and asynchronous I/O. This allows Node.js to handle concurrent connections with a single server.
  • Suits both client-side and server-side development
  • A rich ecosytem having a large number of libraries

Installation

We can directly install Node.js package, install Node.js through a package manager, or use nvm to install Node.js. No matte which way, after it is succesfully installed, we should have access to the node executable program in the command line.

Ref: https://nodejs.dev/learn/how-to-install-nodejs

Components

  • Node CLI
  • NPM
  • package.json
  • Node Modules