Summary

In this chapter, we went on a whirlwind tour of Node. You learned something about why it is designed the way it is and why this event-driven environment is a good solution to modern problems in networked software. Having explained the event loop and the related ideas around concurrency and parallelism, we talked a bit about the Node philosophy of composing software from small pieces loosely joined. You learned about the special advantages that full-stack JavaScript provides and explored new possibilities of applications made possible because of them.

You now have a good understanding of the kind of applications we will be deploying, and this understanding will help you see the unique concerns and considerations faced when building and maintaining Node applications. In the next chapter, we'll dive right in with building servers with Node, options for hosting these applications, and ideas around building, packaging, and distributing them.