Preface

In early 2011, when Manning approached us with the idea of writing a book on Node.js, the state of the Node community was much different than it is now. The community was small and, despite the fact that Node was starting to attract a great deal of interest, Node was still considered a bleeding-edge technology by the mainstream development community. No books had yet been written about it, and although the idea of writing a book was daunting, we decided to go for it.

Given our respective development inclinations, we wanted to create a book that not only focused on the use of Node for web application development, but also explored other interesting potential uses. We wanted to provide a way for web application developers using conventional technologies to harness Node’s vision of bringing asynchronous development to the server.

We’ve worked for more than two years on the book, and during its writing the technology has evolved, so we’ve updated the book accordingly. In addition to the technology changing, the community has also evolved. It is now much larger, and many established companies have embraced Node.

For web application developers looking to try something different, this is a great time to learn Node, and we hope our book helps you learn the technology quickly and have fun doing so.