Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Node Beginner Book

nodebeginner.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 49 posts

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#21

Post by ManuelKiessling »

beck5 wrote: post #19
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #10

Hi all, I'm the author of The Node Beginner Book. Thanks for discussing it here. Your input is a great help. I see the points WA makes regarding the bad things. It's true that it's yet another Node tutorial chewing around on the web server / web app stuff; but I think for the people I'm addressing it's still the most useful scenario because it allows to understand how a full fledged app is put together, and is a grea…

More node resources the better at the moment. A simple CRUD application guide would be very helpful. The java Play! Framework site has a really nice basic blog tutorial which is perfect for understanding the entire process. I plan on starting my first node app in 6 weeks so please hurry up ;)

Hi,

6 weeks should be doable, I started the site last friday :-)

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#23

Post by ManuelKiessling »

city41 wrote: post #12

I'm still trying to understand how node actually works. I'm just about to start digging through its source code. It seems most people view node as a magical mystery that they don't understand why it works, just that it does. How is a single threaded app doing things in parallel? Is it like a game loop where it iterates through all its pending operations and gives each a slice of time to progress forward? Are deeper p…

I too still don't understand 100% what's going on behind the scenes of node/V8 regarding threading/parallelism, but this post here helped me a lot to understand it from a bird's eye perspective:

http://debuggable.com/posts/understanding-node-js:4bd98440-4...

It's also linked from The Node Beginner Book.

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#24

Post by RyanMcGreal »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #14
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #13

This was a well-written, easy-to-follow introduction, but I'd gladly pay money for an actual Node book that takes the reader from introduction to mastery.

Hi Ryan, The Node Beginner Book is still work in progress, it's currently about 35% done. So, there is more to come, but bringing people from introduction to mastery is a completely different story of course. We will see how things develop :-)

Like I said, I would consider paying for a copy once it's finished. :)

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#25

Post by yardie »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #17
yardie wrote: post #15

This will be an invaluable guide in the future but I think it needs more work. Hello World has been covered everywhere so it's utility as an intro is pointless if you are already a programmer or are familiar with programming. The guides I find most useful, in addition to references, are the ones that have you build an application from the ground up. So that you start to understand the pros and cons of the language yo…

Hi yardie, I agree, which is why I only very briefly bring up the Hello World stuff (it's a tradition after all :-)), and then state "Ok, this stuff is boring, right? Let's write some real stuff." And the rest of the tutorial is about building something real and complete (albeit simple). Maybe I should extend the example app a bit, and talk about databases, too. Oh, and please note, the "book" is only about 35% compl…

I've just started to get into it, it's a fantastic job so far so please keep it up. I think you, the nodejs team, and webos are doing a great job.

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#26

Post by WA »

olegp wrote: post #9
WA wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad things: Shows the very same tutorials over and over and over again. Last week, I tried to get my hands on NodeJS in a reasonable short time. That means, I wanted to write a basic web app with some AJAX in NodeJS having 1 or 2 days to actual learn it and another 3 days to implement the app. As much as I would love to see NodeJS to become more widespread, it's not gonna happen with these sparse amount of informatio…

The DailyJS tutorials are a great starting point for this: http://dailyjs.com/2010/11/01/node-tutorial/ That being said, I agree with most of the issues you raise. Lack of backwards compatibility, rapid changes in APIs and the need to build from source make building webapps in Node more complicated than it needs to be. We're trying to address this at Akshell ( http://www.akshell.com ) by making it as easy as possible…

Thanks, I'll check it out tomorrow and give you some feedback.

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#27

Post by ManuelKiessling »

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #24
ManuelKiessling wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Ryan, The Node Beginner Book is still work in progress, it's currently about 35% done. So, there is more to come, but bringing people from introduction to mastery is a completely different story of course. We will see how things develop :-)

Like I said, I would consider paying for a copy once it's finished. :)

I'll get back to you when it's pay day ;-)

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#28

Post by thenduks »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #20
thenduks wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there, thanks for this, I've been looking for something self-contained-ish to point friends to when asking about node. One thing, the site is really messed up in browsers that aren't super wide. My browser is ~1100px wide and the size/positioning of the main content puts it off the right side of the window forcing me to scroll horizontally. I'm not sure why you have stuff like `margin-left: 160px;` in there. It wo…

Hi thenduks, thanks for this one! I changed the CSS as you suggested and updated the site, it's now scroll-bar free down to 1000px.

Sweet, looks awesome.

Btw, on a positive stylistic note. I love the big container and big text. Too many sites these days have tiny microscopic text -- I couldn't read that stuff if my life depended on it, and my eyes are 20/20! :)

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#29

Post by mcastner »

WA wrote: post #7
nailer wrote: post #2

Good things: - Tells me what I'll make with the tutorial right up front. - Lets me know exactly what prerequisite knowledge is (I can tick all those boxes, good). - Aimed at folks who know traditional backend languages and some JS but aren't JS Gods (a lot of node tutes seem to assume complete JS mastery). No bad things so far! Thanks Mr Dumas.

Bad things: Shows the very same tutorials over and over and over again. Last week, I tried to get my hands on NodeJS in a reasonable short time. That means, I wanted to write a basic web app with some AJAX in NodeJS having 1 or 2 days to actual learn it and another 3 days to implement the app. As much as I would love to see NodeJS to become more widespread, it's not gonna happen with these sparse amount of informatio…

I definitely noticed this weird lack of information on Express. I've found the best thing is to check out the examples from Express' own github: https://github.com/visionmedia/express/tree/master/examples

That's useful to see how something is done, but not why or the different options available. For that, there's still a definite lack of a clear guide. The guide on the Express website reads more like an API reference and doesn't go into detail on how to use the different features, which I think would be very helpful.

Right now I'm working on my first application using Express. Over the Summer, when I have free time, I'd like to write a tutorial series for Express and put it up on github so it can be updated as Express evolves. That's really one of the main issues right now, all this stuff is changing so rapidly that a tutorial can become outdated in a few months.

Re: The Node Beginner Book

#30

Post by 2mur »

city41 wrote: post #12

I'm still trying to understand how node actually works. I'm just about to start digging through its source code. It seems most people view node as a magical mystery that they don't understand why it works, just that it does. How is a single threaded app doing things in parallel? Is it like a game loop where it iterates through all its pending operations and gives each a slice of time to progress forward? Are deeper p…

I think that this SO thread is helpful: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3629784/how-is-node-js-in...
Post reply on HN