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Node.js and npm

Node.js is JavaScript on steroids. Initially, a fork of the V8 JavaScript engine from the Google Chrome browser, Node.js was extended with more functionality, specifically to make JavaScript useful on the server-side. File handling, streams, system APIs, and a huge ecosystem of user-generated packages are just some of the facts that make this technology an outstanding partner for your web development.

The node package manager, NPM, is a door to over 200,000 packages and libraries that can help you build your own application or library. The Node.js philosophy is very similar to the UNIX philosophy, where packages should stay small and sharp, but they should use composition to achieve greater goals.

To build our application, we will rely on Node.js as the host for the tools that we're going to use. We should, therefore, make sure that we install Node.js on our machine so that we are prepared for the next chapter, where we will start to craft our task management application.

The code within this book was written using Node.js 8.9.0. Please make sure you're installing an equivalent Node.js version on your system. You can get Node.js from their website at https://nodejs.org, and it should be a breeze to install this on any kind of operating system by following the instructions on their website.

Once you've installed Node.js, we can perform a simple test to check whether everything is up and running. Open a Terminal console and execute the following command:

node -e "console.log('Hello World');"