NodeJS Learning Path: A Guide

In today’s time, software development has become a lucrative field for growth and job opportunities. Most companies have shifted their businesses to online platforms. Therefore, they require developers, be it frontend, backend, or just app. Keeping this in mind, most of our youth have focused on mastering app development.

But one of the fields in development that always requires developers is full-stack development. Full-stack development basically consists of expertise in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. With the knowledge of these three, you can design your own website and the entire framework.

And for building your website, you need to have a good knowledge of NodeJS. Many people are fearful of learning NodeJS. But don’t worry, we are focused on reducing your fear. So in this article, we are going to discuss the best way in which you can learn NodeJS.

What is NodeJS?

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, back-end, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside a web browser. Node.js lets developers use JavaScript to write command-line tools and for server-side scripting—running scripts server-side to produce dynamic web page content before the page is sent to the user’s web browser. Consequently, Node.js represents a “JavaScript everywhere” paradigm, unifying web application development around a single programming language, rather than different languages for server- and client-side scripts.

The Node.js distributed development project was previously governed by the Node.js Foundation and has now merged with the JS Foundation to form the OpenJS Foundation, which is facilitated by the Linux Foundation’s Collaborative Projects program.

Now that we have discussed the introductory part of NodeJS, let us see what is the need to study NodeJS.

Why study NodeJS

Now we shouldn’t just start learning anything because everyone’s telling us. You should be knowing what you are studying and what’s the use of studying it The same thing goes for Node also. To answer what’s mentioned in the title, here are a few points that will help you in answering that question.

1. Simple Learning Curve – Node JS uses Javascript as its scripting language. Javascript is used by a lot of technologies like React and Angular. What makes JS suitable is that it can be used for the frontend as well as the backend. Because of this, it is easy to maintain synchronism between the server side and client-side. Node provides great productivity and its ability to reprocess the code offers a great experience.
2. Single Codebase – In Node, it is very easy to send data between two sides because of the same language used at both ends. Because of this reason, the consistency is more, the time taken is less, and the code required for the completion is less.
3. Great Corporate Support – NodeJS foundation was formed by companies like Microsoft and SAP. It is an independent community whose primary aim is to fasten the development of NodeJS tools. The purpose of the foundation NodeJS was to improve the rate of development and allow mass adoption of it at the same time. A good amount of growth has been noticed for companies using NodeJS in production. A lot of famous and rich companies are included in it.
4. Real-Time Applications – Node JS works really well with apps involving real-time interaction. Apps involving gaming, chatting, social media updates, and live tracking can make use of Node JS for better operations. The synchronization with NodeJS is pretty quick and organized as events drive the architecture that serves both sides.

With this, the need to study NodeJS has been completed. Now, we go on to see how we can study it.

How to learn Node JS?

The biggest question for new learners is where they should learn NodeJS from. What are some of the best tutorials and/or instructors to learn Node JS? So in this article, we are going to mention the top courses available out there, from beginner to advanced level, which will help you in choosing the best option to learn NodeJS.

The Complete Node JS Developer Course

This course is one of the best courses you can find on NodeJS. It covers all the basic parts of Node JS before diving into Express JS, Mongoose, and MongoDB.

The target of the course is set only on one thing: Teaching you Node JS in such a way that you become a professional developer, capable of developing, testing, and deploying real-world production applications.

To summarise this in brief, it’s a great course for those who want to understand Node JS.

NodeJS- The Complete Guide(MVC, API, GraphQL)

This is one of the best Node JS courses available on Udemy. This course is created by the great instructor Maximilian Schwarmuller.

In this course, not only would you learn Node JS, but also many other technologies like Rest APIs with Node JS, Deno.js, GraphQL, APIs, and many more alongside it.

The main things you will learn in this course are:

• Gives a good idea regarding the basic and advanced concepts of NodeJS in detail.
• How to build modern, fast, and scalable server-side web applications with NodeJS, databases like SQL or MongoDB, and more
• Understanding the ecosystem of NodeJS and building the apps rendered on the server side and APIs.
• It provides a good introductory part to Deno.js, a Typescript-based runtime.

In short, a nice way to learn NodeJS.

Node JS Advanced Concepts

This is an advanced course to learn Node.js and it focuses on things like how to do caching with Redis, speed up through clustering, and add image upload with S3 and Node.

The important things you will learn in this course are mentioned below:

• Understanding of Event Loop and its individual stages.
• Utilization of Worker threads and clustering to improve the performance of Node servers.
• Adding automated browser testing to your Node server with continuous pipeline integration.

This course is perfect for those who have a brief understanding of NodeJS and want to understand next-level concepts.

Introduction to Node JS

This course, which is available on Pluralsight, is the best course to gain an understanding of Node for starters. It is one of the best courses out there which isn’t from Udemy.

Through this course, you will get to know the background of Node and ideas and techniques for writing asynchronous code, and the usage of callbacks and streams.

Learn and Understand Node JS

This is another good option to understand Node online. Not only will you get a brief understanding of essential concepts like Buffers and Streams but also how Node actually works. You will also get to understand how Node actually works.

You’ll also learn how asynchronous code works in Node and the Node event loop, as well as how to use the event emitter, streams, buffers, pipes, and work with files.

To summarise this course in a few words, it is the best available option for intermediate web developers and starters.

Conclusion

Node. js is primarily used for non-blocking, event-driven servers, due to its single-threaded nature. It’s used for traditional websites and back-end API services but was designed with real-time, push-based architectures in mind.

Node. js is nothing but an open-source application runtime environment that enables you to write server-side powerful applications using JavaScript. It is very lightweight, efficient as well as capable to use JavaScript on both – front-end and back-end development, and it opens new channels up for web development.

According to PayScale, the average Node. js salary in the US ranges from $48,000 to $130,000, with an average of $86,948 (at the time of the publication). At the same time, the median hourly rate is $26.75.

A Node. js developer is responsible for writing server-side web application logic in JavaScript and/or variants of it, such as CoffeeScript, IcedCoffeeScript, etc.

To conclude, Node JS is a great language for those who want to become a developer. The opportunities opened by Node JS are endless and it can give a good boost to your career. For learning it, you can use the courses mentioned above. I hope you find your answer through them.

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