The Project I’ve been working on lately has been a really eye opening experience in a lot of ways. Working in a group I’m being exposed to all sorts of things I never have been before. When discussing what tech stack to use, I suggested using React for frontend and RoR for the backend of the application. Everyone was on board for React of course but I was the only one who had ever used RoR for anything. Everyone else in this group was mostly familiar with Node.js
This week, so as not to be left out I started from the basics teaching myself Node. Here’s what I learned so far:
Node.js is so popular because it essentially allows us to run JavaScript directly on out computers. This is cool because usually JavaScript lives in the browser exclusively. Theres a bunch of really neat computer science tricks happening under the hood but essentially, Node is a wrapper that translates Js into something that can be compiled down to C++ and ultimately understood by the machine.
With regular javascript everything is tied to the global window object and basically all methods are chained off of that by default. In Node there is a similar concept of the global object that is assumed and has a variety of methods that can be chained off of it.
In my very early learning of the basics as well, I learned that one of the cool benefits if Node is being able to essentially perform CRUD actions on the file system with Js.
I have plenty more to learn but just from the very basics I think I’m going to like Node a lot and from how popular it is I think it will be a super useful skill to have under my belt. Can’t wait to try it out on a real project soon.