Sidenote on my health situation
Note: you can skip to the next section if you are not interested in this painful topic.
It is on Friday, at 3 AM.
I must be honest; my main focus right now is handling the pain I have in my big right toe because I had surgery on it yesterday. I already had laser surgery because of an ingrown toenail ten years ago, but it seems it made the problem worse. That is why a big chunk of the meat is taken out now right to the bone (no lasers used). And the anesthetic effect just had worn off. Since I cannot sleep, I decided why not to learn some Node.js?
I can do it! I must do it! The pain is growing.
Sorry! Now, getting back to learning.
Hone your skills!
I decided to learn more about Node.js. I have been using it for years now, but it does not hurt to check some courses on topics, even if you use it every day. There are always new ways to use a tool, new techniques, new patterns, and new ideas. Learning a programming language is not just about reading the documentation once. It is a practice we hone until we retire from it.
My chosen platform to learn
For learning programming, my main chosen platform is Pluralsight. I am not sponsored by them; I am just using it since soon after I finished university and it has been proven to be a great source for that.
If you want to follow along my live learning journey, you can check out my Pluralsight profile here: https://app.pluralsight.com/profile/botondev
On Pluralsight, you can take single courses, or you can select from many paths, collections of well organized courses, from beginner to expert levels, each course building on top of the previous one. I can highly recommend them.
Getting back to the basics of Node.js
I was looking for a refresher on the basic Node.js topic, so I picked the “Working with Node.js” path. It has one big collection of courses (some other paths have multiple collections), with 18 hours and 37 minutes of video content. It will keep me busy for a while. Although, there are paths that have more than a hundred hours of content on other topics. Also, there are multiple paths on the same topic. I am planning to watch those as well once I finish this or work requires it.
The first course I am about to watch is “Node.js 12: The Big Picture” by Paul O’Fallon. Although Node version 21 has already been released, this is a beginner course from 2019.
Side note: I must be honest; this toe pain is no joke! Yikes!
Now I start watching it.
This course introduces the concepts of Node.js (its history, examples where it has been used, its strengths and weaknesses), the event loop, the Christmas tree problem of callbacks, the async await, the Promises, the event emitters, the streams, the npm and yarn package managers, and at the end, it gives a list of testing libraries that work well together.
Here they are:
- Mocha: Test Framework (mochajs.org)
- Chai: Assertion Library (www.chaijs.com)
- Sinon: Spies, Stubs and Mocks (sinonjs.org)
- Istanbul: Code Coverage (istanbul.js.org)
I have to admit that during the development of all of my projects, testing was the smallest priority, so now I need to spend more time learning and practicing. A list of libraries like these helps me a great deal.
It was a small 55-minute course. Its purpose is to give an introduction to Node.js and help people decide if they want to learn it further. I enjoyed this course. It was easy to watch, follow, and understand.
The next course
It is still early in the morning, 5:30. My toe still hurts and is bleeding a bit, so I cannot stop to find something that can distract me from the pain.
My chosen course is the next in the pipeline, which is:
“Node.js 12: Getting Started” by Samer Buna.
Length: 3 hours and 30 minutes.
The first two lines of the introduction mention big names like PayPal, Netflix, LinkedIn, and even NASA, which are using Node.js.
Based on its length, I expect this course to be more practical and to have some code samples to work on.
Let’s see what it offers.
[watching …]
I will continue my report in my next article.
