Express in Action is a carefully designed tutorial that teaches you how to build web applications using Node and Express.
Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.
About the Technology
Express.js is a web application framework for Node.js. Express organizes your server-side JavaScript into testable, maintainable modules. It provides a powerful set of features to efficiently manage routes, requests, and views along with beautiful boilerplate for your web applications. Express helps you concentrate on what your application does instead of managing time-consuming technical details.
About the Book
Express in Action teaches you how to build web applications using Node and Express. It starts by introducing Node's powerful traits and shows you how they map to the features of Express. You'll explore key development techniques, meet the rich ecosystem of companion tools and libraries, and get a glimpse into its inner workings. By the end of the book, you'll be able to use Express to build a Node app and know how to test it, hook it up to a database, and automate the dev process.
What's Inside
About the Reader
To get the most out of this book, you'll need to know the basics of web application design and be proficient with JavaScript.
About the Author
Evan Hahn is an active member of the Node and Express community and contributes to many open source JavaScript projects.
One of the best written books I've ever read related to web development!
Currently, I am going deeper into the JavaScript world and going from front-end developer to back-end. Node and Express were first on my list to learn next, and this book did a great job!
It is beginner friendly, everything is so nicely explained that you don't have to read twice haha :) Easy to follow and learn and I would definitelly recommend! I really love this book.
This is another excellent JavaScript book from Manning. It contains a great introduction to Express.js and I wish I’d read it sooner as it explains a lot of things about Express.js and how to use it, as well as the tools surrounding it and Node.js, which I had previously worked out for myself. If you’re thinking of writing a web application, especially one in JavaScript, I recommend you read this book first.
The book is far from perfect. It could have been a lot shorter. There is a fair amount of repetition and the chatty style makes it overly verbose and irritating in many places. The author tries to cover too much and goes beyond Express.js unnecessarily in a few places. However, given that, it’s still not a huge book and quite easy to read.
Express in Action is a great resource for those looking to learn Express framework for Node.js development. I like the author's step by step approach and the breadth of topics covered. Express is probably the most popular framework for web development (and for RESTful API development) and most likely has surpassed Ruby on Rails (RoR) in popularity. It was definitely an enjoyable read.
Express is mostly stable now, so the first 8 chapters or so are still not outdated. However, the rest of the chapters feels a bit obsolete now.
I also did not enjoy the humor of the author, which felt really forced. Probably I like dry texts more than the average reader though, so that is fine.
I especially liked the chapters botu Routers and Middleware. Still, expected a more thorough treatment of the best practices, and wanted to see more structure for larger applications. This is mostly an introductory book, but did not realize it before reading it all.
A quick read for getting to know ExpressJS - a small framework for writing backend Javascript on Node. The author can be quite verbose and chatty in writing. Without those, the book could be shorten by 2/3. The core concepts (Middleware, Routes, Extension to request/response and Views) are explained clearly with examples on Github. There are some good tips on using, comparison with other languages (Rails, PHP...) here and there. Still, I hope the author could dive more details into the inner working of Express.
This is really a good book for node beginners. It doesn's introduce any JS syntax but only for the use of Express library. It seems verbose in the first a few chapters and has many repeated contents. But the overall ideas are displayed well. There are only a few codes are outdated, most of them are working and still useful to learn.
Overall, I think for someone who has a bit feeling about using nodejs and express, this is truly a good book to discover what left for you.
If you are a self-taught NodeJS dev like myself, this book will serve as a great review of what you have learnt, enhanced with best practices and current trends in the MEAN (or more like MEN) stack.
Having developed a few applications before, I got to learn about testing, security and best practices. The rest of the things I learnt while developing.
I have a strong background in system programming, so this was a great book break into the web development domain. It was quick read to introduce many areas related to web app development using NodeJS with the ExpressJS framework. It is a quick introduction for each topic, but the author does give plenty of references for continued reading.