We'll cover a ton of exciting stuff in this chapter. We'll learn how to make a web server and how to integrate version control into Node applications. Now to get all this done, we will look at a framework called Express. It's one of the most popular npm libraries, and for good reason. It makes it really easy to do stuff such as creating a web server or an HTTP API. It's kind of similar to the Dark Sky API we used in the last chapter.
Now most courses start with Express, and that can be confusing because it blurs the line between what is Node and what is Express. We'll kick things off by adding Express to a brand new Node app.
Specifically, we'll cover the following topics:
- Introducing Express
- Static server
- Rendering templates
- Advanced templates
- Middleware