Chapter 1. Welcome to the Node.js Platform

Some principles and design patterns literally define developer experience with the Node.js platform and its ecosystem; the most peculiar ones are probably its asynchronous nature and its programming style that, in its simplest incarnation, make heavy use of callbacks. It's important that we first dive into these fundamental principles and patterns, not only for writing correct code, but also to be able to take effective design decisions when it comes to solving bigger and more complex problems.

Another aspect that characterizes Node.js is its philosophy. Approaching Node.js is in fact way more than simply learning a new technology; it's also embracing a culture and a community. We will see how this greatly influences the way we design our applications and components, and the way they interact with those created by the community.

In addition to these aspects, it's worth knowing that the latest versions of Node.js introduced support for many of the features described by ES2015 (formerly ES6), which makes the language even more expressive and enjoyable to use. It is important to embrace these new syntactic and functional additions to the language in order to be able to produce more concise and readable code and come up with alternative ways to implement the design patterns that we are going to see throughout this book.

In this chapter, we will learn the following topics:

• The Node.js philosophy, the "Node way"
• Node.js version 6 and ES2015
• The reactor pattern—the mechanism at the heart of the Node.js asynchronous architecture