Connecting to the Driver

At a high level, the process of using the Node.js driver with MongoDB is similar to connecting directly with the shell. You will specify a MongoDB server URI, several connection parameters, and you can execute queries against collections. This should all be quite familiar; the main difference will be that these instructions will be written in JavaScript instead of Bash or PowerShell.

Introduction to Node.js

Since the objective of this chapter is not to learn Node.js programming, we will briefly cover the fundamentals to ensure that we can create our MongoDB application. The js in Node.js stands for JavaScript because JavaScript is the programming language that Node.js understands. JavaScript typically runs in a browser. However, you can think of Node.js as an engine that executes the JavaScript files on your computer.

Over the course of this chapter, you will write JavaScript (.js) syntax and execute it with Node.js. Although you can write JavaScript...