Node: Up and Running (Node.js book)

[Jackolantern]

While a flood of Node books are coming out in mid-Fall, for right now, all we really have are a couple of tiny ( < 60 pages) "books", an older web development-specific book (that only covers web development with Express and was written before the Windows or Mac versions of Node came out) and Node: Up and Running, Scalable Server-Side Javascript, published by O'Reilly. Even though the choices are extremely limited if you want a book to learn more about Node, the author does not appear to have tried capitalizing on that fact by writing a shallow book that simply rehashes existing online tutorials. Instead we have a pretty big dive into the material of Node, including some great topics very hard to find in the existing documentation, such as extending Node, successfully setting-up error handling, clustering Node to take advantage of multi-cores and more. It also spends an early section of the book focusing on asynchronous programming patterns, something that few programmers are currently familiar with. It really eases the move from procedural or OOP to async before thrusting you into the deeper corners of the API and platform itself.

Is it perfect? Definitely not. I have seen odd typo after odd typo, but so far all the code has worked. Speaking of code, that leads me to my next gripe, and that is that the author did not keep a consistent style through the entire book. Either that, or they simply forgot to use semi-colons at times. If that is the case, that is kind of scary, since most C-style programmers would put semi-colons after every sentence they speak if they could, it gets so ingrained in you.

I recommend this book, but with a bit of hesitation to perhaps wait and see what these books coming out around Halloween will look like (Node.js in Action, Professional Node and Wrox Professional Node).