Monthly Archives: March 2011

Great Resource -> Felix’s Node.js Guide

FelixnodejsguideWant to learn more about Node.js? Felix Geisendörfer recently rolled out a site with a series of guides to help people get started:

http://nodeguide.com/

So far he has these guides available:

  • Node.js Beginner Guide
  • Node.js Style Guide
  • Node.js Community Guide
  • Node.js Convincing The Boss Guide

and promises more to come. He is nicely using a Github repo for the development of the guides and you can monitor that repo to see what is in development.

Documentation and training are always critical elements of helping people get started with a new language, so it’s great to see initiatives like this one. I’m definitely watching the Github repo and have been reading through his guides already.

Thanks, Felix, for putting these docs online!

A Sign of the Node.js Buzz – Joyent Launches a Node.js Jobs Site

Node.js certainly has been getting a good bit of buzz these days. I’ve been writing about Node.js here because I personally find it interesting, but you only have to watch the Twitter search string to know that a lot of other people out there find the same fascination with Node.js.

It’s a sign of that intense interest, then, that Joyent launched a “Node.js Jobs” site this week at:

http://jobs.nodejs.org/a/jobs/find-jobs

with some initial postings from some of the startups that you might expect to be using a bleeding edge service like Node.js:

NodejsJobs

Very cool to see… and may it only help grow the pool of Node.js developers out there!

Mashable: Why Everyone Is Talking About Node.js

NodejsIf you are wondering why so much attention is focused on Node.js these days in the online media and sites (including my own writing about Node.js), Mashable had a decent post this week called:

Why Everyone Is Talking About Node

It’s a good overview that explains much about why Node.js is so interesting to so many people. I’m not sure I agree with the author about the Ruby community being “exclusive and harsh”. I experienced nothing but helpful assistance back when I was learning Ruby. The Node.js community, though, has definitely been very welcoming to newcomers so far.

Regardless of that probably unnecessary dig, the overall article was a good overview of Node and is certainly worth a read.

Online Preview Available of O’Reilly’s Upcoming “Up and Running with Node.js”

Tom Hughes-Croucher is writing a book for O’Reilly & Associates about Node.js called “Up and Running with Node.js” and he tweeted out today that a preview of the book is now available online at:

http://ofps.oreilly.com/titles/9781449398583/index.html

As he says in the author intro:

When Simon, my editor, and I were initially discussing this project it was obvious how vibrant the Node.js community is. We felt that it was important that we engaged with the community as we worked on this manuscript. In order to do that we decided to release the book in parts as I wrote it. What you are reading now is one of those partial releases.

It’s very cool that he’s made the text available and will be continuing to update it as the book evolves. Apparently he has to do something to enable commenting, but shortly you should be able to comment on his text.

Nice to see authors doing this to solicit input from the larger community before a book is actually printed. Very cool.

Upandrunningwithnodejs

Great (long!) Article on Node.js in The Register

TheregisterWhat is Node.js all about? How did it come about? What prompted Ryan Dahl to create Node? What other languages did he try? Who are some of the companies using Node.js, and why? What does Google think about Node.js, given that they maintain the V8 JavaScript engine used by Node? What are the kind of performance gains you can see in Node?

Answers to all those questions and many more are in a lengthy piece on The Register titled “The Node Ahead: JavaScript leaps from browser into future“. It’s a well done article and rather than excerpt it here, I’d encourage you to go take a look at the full piece. Interesting to read about some of the background of which I was not aware. Good stuff!