Express in Action: Writing, building, and testing Node.js applications First Edition

I'm fairly new to web development and only recently started writing server side javascript. I'm a student and purchased this book out of curiosity and to improve my overall web development knowledge.This book was an excellent read, provided me with knowledge on topics outside express directly, and was enjoyable to read. I don't view this as a reference book and I suspect that professional web developers, who use express daily, may find this book to be a bit too inclusive of additional information beyond strict express examples. I feel this additional information and context makes the book appealing and accessible and don't think the express professional was the target audience anyway.The greatest strength in this book, for me, was the breadth of the information provided -- I recommend viewing the "look inside" available on this amazon page to view the "brief contents" to see for yourself. At ~230 pages the book reads quickly (I easily finished and, more importantly, felt I understood the bulk of the information in only a couple days) and does not extensively cover every detail of the included topics. It does however provide a general overview, some relevant examples, and then information on where to find additional resources on the topics. I really appreciate this format.The section on testing, when compared to the other sections, felt a bit weak to me. I don't view this as a negative as I felt it did a nice job of covering why this is important topic, but I can't say I fully grasped the examples as well as I did in the other sections.

If you're pretty good at JavaScript, but maybe not quite as good at full stack development, this is your book. Seriously, stop looking, this is the one you want.The best thing about "Express in Action" is that it takes a very step-by-step approach to a Node stack, starting with Node itself. It shows how to make a small, simple web app using just Node, then brings in Express with a minimum of modules, along with more excellent explanations.This is important, because although the modular nature of Node and Express is a strength, it can also make things very confusing. A lot of online tutorials and even books throw a bunch of third-party modules into their code without really explaining how or why they work. Express in Action does not make that mistake. It goes into detail about how modules are incorporated, how Express's middleware stack works, etc.Obviously, this isn't a book for those completely new to programming or web development. In order to get the value of it, you'll want to have at least an intermediate knowledge of JavaScript. Ideas like callbacks, JSON, APIs and closures should not be new to you, and it would help if you've worked with a library or two, such as jQuery. It might also help to have a little exposure to the back end, either through writing some basic apps with Node and Express or even through something like Ruby on Rails or .Net MVC. You don't have to be an expert, but if you have even a little bit of experience with how web apps work on the server side you'll find that this book makes a lot more sense.This is the best introduction to Node and Express that I've seen, and I've been looking for some time. I 100% recommend this book.

Used this as a base to help create a course for a class. The author does give some good insight and does provide some decent information on why node is the way it is and setup. However, with npm packages constantly being added and upgraded books like these can become outdated quickly. So while I appreciate this book for what and why, the how I would look at recent tutorials online while with current npm packages

Hi All, positive, negative and kind of my personalpositive 1: chapter 10, Evan delivered this content perfectly, very clear statements and solutions.positive 2: for junior and middle this book is right choice.positive 3: I like how Evan explained npm + shrinkwrap, but I recommend to mention in second edition, that there is no guarantee anyway since developers can unpublish and publish back with same version, plz add it.negative 1: chapter 2 page 30. It says that require and module.exports are globals. This is wrong, even module is not global. Please fire errata.negative 2: browserify is a great thing in context mentioned by Evan, but negative sides of browserify are bigger paint and there is no explanation why. At the market browserify is the worst approach, even requirejs is better for browser. There is no clue why in the book. Browserify could suck big part of your nodejs to browser, if you don't point attention on what you use. Browserify doesn't allow you to load something else in the future, only one bundle. What browserify could do if your bundle is 5mb, sure you can split it into more bundles and try to manage them. I am sure there are much better module bundle loaders out there (requirejs, webpack).negative 3: ejs templates, look at header.ejs and footer.ejs. I don't recommend to use smth like that on production. When I want to leverage layouts, my html should not be opened in one template and closed in another. Juniors could make some if statements, so that your logic will be managed in more templates. I see some meteor school here, which I don't like. But meteor doesn't distribute such tags across different templates.negative 4: when explaining passport, Evan started with idea, that we should not use old approach in the book with global variables, because data will not be distributed across cluster. Evan spend some time to explain express session, which is stored and recreated on each node. Same problem will impact if junior store some additional data in session which is driven just by SID. I wish Evan to explain what kind of session could be used in express and how it is restored on each node in cluster.personal 1: it is 2016, I wish to have some ES6 code and classes to express my routes.personal 2: I want to have more express content in the book, but got more express in context. 1/2 of the book is about express, but second half is about context, better to spend less pages on context. I wish to have smth like how you should implement it without express, please show this nightmare and explain why we need express now.