Chapter 1: Introducing Node-RED and Flow-Based Programming
This chapter will help you grow from being a reader to being a Node-RED user. First, you'll learn about the history of Flow-based programming (FBP) tools, not just Node-RED. You will then gain a broad understanding of the entirety of Node-RED as a useful tool for building web applications and the Internet of Things (IoT) data handling, before learning what IoT and Node.js are in terms of Node-RED.
Providing technical content will help accelerate your software application development, but if you take a look at the history of the Node-RED tool itself, it will help you better understand why you need a FBP tool such as Node-RED. That is what we will be doing in this chapter.
More specifically, we'll be covering the following topics:
- What is FBP?
- What is Node-RED?
- Node-RED benefits
- Node-RED and IoT
Let's get started!
