Node
Node is a huge topic that can, and has, filled books in its own right. So, it’s not covered much here, but it’s important to know about. From the Node team: “As an asynchronous event-driven framework, Node.js is designed to build scalable network applications.” Well, that sounds all fine and dandy, but what are you going to use Node for? The answer to this is, you won’t really.
To clarify, almost all the tools covered this hour are built on top of Node or require Node in some way or another. Node is a highly flexible module-based platform built on top of the Google Chrome V8 engine and ECMAscript, which means that almost all of JavaScript’s native functions, objects, and methods are supported. This has enabled developers to quickly build amazing tools using the language they are already comfortable with.
It is important to note that Node.js is a “server-side” framework that you can use for all sorts of applications, and the use of it in this book is to enable front-end development tools. For the uses covered in this book, install Node on your development machine and not on your web server.
To install Node, visit the Node website at https://nodejs.org.