Practical Node.js: Building Real-World Scalable Web Apps 1st ed. Edition

I've read many IT books, have read many programming books... this is BY FAR the best book I've ever read. It has everything you need to build and deploy a web application.I strongly believe that Node is the best framework for the web, and this books does a great job introducing you to this amazing technology. Obviously, it doesn't cover ALL about Node, it's to wide a subject to be fit in this book.I like a lot that the author walks you step by step through all the steps and technology that you require to put forward a well made web application.As a seasoned developer, I recommend this book to everyone that wants to learn Node, it is usefull for beginners and experts (I'm an expert and found very interesting things in this book), I totally recommend it!

This is the very first book that I read about the MEAN stack. I have now read 2 other extensive books on the subject and I will share my impressions about this book, Practical Node.js, by Azat Mardan :àFirst of all, Node.js and the other JavaScript-based technologies that have emerged in the last few years have evolved and changed quite rapidly so you have to judge this book for its relevance at a specific moment in time, i.e. when it was written. In that context, I think that this is a good book, for a couple of reasons :- The author (Azat Mardan) knows the MEAN stack very well. He seems to have some real-world experience with these technologies.- Azat's experience with the MEAN stack has given him some insight about them. I have tried several of the relative technologies to the MEAN stack like different template engines (Jade, Handlebars, EJS, ...), different Express middleware, different database solutions/session stores (mongoDB, Redis, ...). I can say that Azat's recommendations about which of these technologies you should consider in various developement scenarios are spot on. To me, what he recommends and his choice of complementary technologies for your Node.js/MEAN projects are excellent recommendations. In my own experience, I ended up trying different options and ended up choosing pretty much the same technologies recommended in this book. Like I said, I have read other books on Node.js/MEAN and this is not always the case.- The book directs you towards different resources for further reading/exploring of subjects covered in the book or not covered but worth knowing about.Now, what makes this book imperfect is mainly that it seems to have lacked careful editorial reviewing before being put on the market. There are some holes here and there when you read the book. This has been mentioned by other reviewers. This is a little frustrating but in my case it happened maybe 2 or 3 times during my reading. I was reading and then suddenly : "Hey, how did we get to this code from the last code example ?". It seems like the author has jumped or omitted some transitional paragraphs here and there. But we have to keep in mind that this is a book about some fast-changing open-source technologies and the author has to get it out quickly, otherwise it becomes outdated by the time it gets published. And as far as I know, when this book came out on the market, there was pretty much nothing else that covered as much of these topics. So it was still highly valuable, even with its imperfections.I have not mentioned the topics of mongoDB and angularJS in my review because I have learned these from other sources. I have read these chapters quickly but I can say that if you're serious about using these technologies in your stack, you will need to complement the info provided in this book with some more in-depth books/online tutorials/... Again, Azat Mardan shares some good insights about how to use these in your projects, whether you should use mongoskin or mongoose with mongoDB, etc. But these topics simply have too much scope to be covered extensively in this book.Overall, I think that this book is still valuable today. It has certainly help me. We keep an eye on the io.js project that seems promising but it's not ready for production yet. So at this point in time, Node.js and the MEAN stack is a great option for some projects and this book will get you started fast. My recommendation is that you buy this book and one or two other books on the MEAN stack at the same time. This has worked well for me because you can compare the different approaches from the authors. You can also read on a single topic across your 2-3 books and some info will be complementary. With books like this one and others on open-source tech, spreading your reading between different books helps you gain a better perspective on the topics.

The book is a mess when it comes to it's organization and typographical styling and consistency. When I start a new chapter it feels like I must have missed the first few pages because it feels like I jumped right into the middle of an example. The book as a whole also feels like I must have missed the first 20 pages or so as it doesn't really do a decent job of giving the basics of what is NodeJS and the concepts needed to understand the rest of the book. Strangely, the book dives into excruciating detail on arbitrary subjects like the 7 pages it uses to describe various ways to install NPM. It tries to give some overview of JavaScript fundamentals but again the coverage is random as is its assumption of previous knowledge. Overall, the book is very random in what it covers and what it assumes someone should know ahead of time. That said, NodeJS looks to be fairly easy to get started to use and the book is some help there if you use it as a tutorial. I imagine there are better resources than this book.

The best part of the book is in the title: Practical. The first chapter gives a summary of the approach taken in the code and makes for a more organized and comprehensive coding experience. Then, the chapters introduce the tools needed for various types of projects. After describing what the author is trying to teach, each of the projects starts with a summary list of what is to be accomplished which gives a greater cohesion to the project. This isn't just code with comments; you can understand the experience from someone who has had to figure it out without a map.I give this 5 starts because I started with it today and have already cut & pasted some of it for my job.

I searched node.js on Amazon and this book came on top so I bought it and I have to say I was very disappointed by it. It just doesn't feel like a book at all to me, not much background introduction, why we do this here and how to extend it to other problems. It feels more like a handout binder from one of those training classes which lists the steps of things did in the classroom. Anyway, I couldn't learn much from it, not even after I came back a while after learning a bit from somewhere else. On top of that, the font is very small and paper yellowish. I'm just gonna avoid this author and publisher altogether in the future. Just not my style of at all. I would recommend "Web Development with Node and Express", much easier to understand and less than half of the cost.