Book Review: NodeJS The Right Way
I started reading NodeJS the Right Way with the aim of getting a better understanding of the pro’s and con’s of NodeJS versus frameworks like Rails and Go – especially from a web development perspective. I have limited experience with Node, but I have never used it in a production system so I was really approaching it from a newbie perspective.
The book was a reasonably quick read – it took me about 2 week to finish. The book has a good balance of code examples versus explanations – every chapter tries to focus on a different aspect of the Node architecture. It starts out with simple asynchronous programming through callbacks and then introduces other concepts like network patterns and futures.
Overall the book is well written and the examples are simple and concise. I was perhaps looking for more content in the area of web development – the book does cover web development, but only briefly. Examples of asynchronous file access is great for getting started, but doesn’t really translate well into anything that you might do on a daily basis.
I was really looking for a book that deals with the problems of real-world NodeJS applications (which I’m guessing are mostly web applications). For example, the book covers database access, but only does CouchDB – how about showing NodeJS interacting with a MySQL database? Overall it’s a solid book, but I was definitely looking for something a bit more focused on web applications.
NodeJS the Right Way is available on Amazon for $15 (at time of writing).
Happy coding.