Web Development with MongoDB and Node.js

Jason is a MEAN expert! Great real world examples and spoken in a language that anyone can understand. Highly recommend this book to anyone who is spiking the Mongo/Express/Angular/Node stack to build engaging single page apps in JS.

A not so great book. All the examples are extremely unclear and assume you magically know where his putting all the code. I feel the author should at a basic level tell you how to implement certain portions of the code. For example, how to install bootstrap, he uses it and just assumes we should be following along. I was able to get bootstrap working relatively easily, I don't see why he couldn't have just added a few lines to tell you how to implement it. Also, a complete code section at the end of chapters would be nice. In case we missed anything or couldn't follow where he was ending </div> tags and such. An example shouldn't be so much to work to accomplish. It should be here is the code, and here is how it works. Not random tidbits of code, then a paragraph, then more code tidbits (good luck putting them in the right spot), here is a paragraph.

This is outdated and no one should buy it. The code examples no longer work.

Writing RESTful services in Nodejs can be as simple as glueing modules. Internet is plenty of Node.js middleware. To achieve so, you first need to learn the basics.It's better to have some previous knowledge of Javascript before reading this book as Web Development with MongoDB and Node.js has a tiny introduction to Javascript and Node.js.The book explains how to scaffold web applications through full coded examples. Middleware is the key of being highly productive and the book uses and explains the most well-known modules. You'll find out a big example split into several chapters that is a clone of a popular social image-sharing site that will show you things such as:Express: handle routing, middleware injection, ...Connect: a suite of middleware for multiple things. In the book Connect is used to deal with json, cookies, logging, parsing, encoding, HTTP method support, handling errors ...Handlebars: apart from explaining the basics of this template engine, it also shows how to build html layouts, partial views which prevent code duplication and helpers used for injecting functions at the time of rendering.And all this is wired up with MongoDB which is a NoSQL database. You'll learn the really basics of CRUD operations over Mongo (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete). But Mongo is such simple that it really doesn't need further explanation other than seeing the API definition. This makes the book swift and faster to read. As it's already a tradition with Mongo and Javascript, it also involves Mongoose. Mongoose introduces schemas and models, that is to say built-in types, field restrictions and validation.The book culminates with four miscellaneous chapters. A chapter dedicated to testing using Behavior Driven Development (Mocha, Chai.js, Sinon.js, Proxyquire). Another chapter that gathers some web services (like Heroku, Amazon, Digital Ocean, Nodejitsu and Microsoft Azure) and tells how to deploy your nodejs web-apps. And finally, the last two chapters reviews front-end frameworks like: Backbone.js, Ember.js, Angular.js; and Node.js frameworks like Meteor, Sails, hapi, Koa or Flatiron.At the end of the book you will be more likely to start developing your own RESTful services as Node.js makes things simple and this book covers really common problems.You can get your copy of Web Development with MongoDB and Node.js right here!

The examples in this book are outdated and do not work correctly.

This book really gives you hands-on experience on how to build web applications with NodeJS and MongoDB and in this regard the author fully achieved what is presented as one of the main goal of the book.The introduction is smooth and will work you step-by-step through a typical installation of both NodeJS and MongoDB. After a quick JavaScript and MongoDB course you will get into tools that matters when building web apps : frameworks. Express.js is particularly suited for it handles lots of things related to any typical web app (routes, controllers, etc etc). You will design your UI through powerful templates using Handlebars and see how to persist data both in a "raw" way and using the Mongoose ODM. You also get to build a RESTful API which nowadays is really useful knowledge to any project you may be working on (now or in the future) and I am really talking about design considerations here (a RESTful API remains RESTful whichever technology you choose to implement it with). The book also show you how to test your code or how to host your apps into the cloud with currently popular cloud providers (Heroku, AWS, Azure, etc etc). But the real bonus point of this publication lies within the last chapters where the author show you some how to push your newly acquired skills further either by exploring SPA frameworks such as Angular, Backbone or Ember or by investigating Express alternatives in the vast world of frontend JS frameworks (Meteor and Sails just to name a few).The only aspect where this book might fall short is in its technical depth : you will not gain deep knowledge of the intricacies of NodeJS nor MongoDB, simply because it is not the main focus of this book. It is already quite an exploit for it to teach how to build full scale web app from back to front with so few requirements. Little knowledge of JavaScript is needed as the author quickly goes over what you need to know in chapter 3. Again you will not be a JS expert after reading this chapter.Overall it is a very good reading for those who wants to quickly get their feet wet in the world of NodeJS and MongoDB. You cand find more about it at https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/web-development-mongodb-and-nodejs