I'm a college student on summer break. So last week, in a moment of un-idleness, the word "Node.js" popped into my head. "Hey, I remember seeing this word on Hacker News!" I thought to myself. So I decided to see what the fuss is about: I typed "Node.js" into my Chrome address bar and smashed "Enter."
Lo and behold, the first thing I did was read "The Node Beginner Book" at nodebeginner.org. I read every word, and I made this little thing that uploads and displays images. Along the way, I internalized all this Node knowledge, and I can regurgitate it at will: - Node is good for building fast, scalable network apps. - It's good at this because of its event-driven, non-blocking model. - I know what an event-driven, non-blocking model is because I know JavaScript, I know what callbacks are, and I read "The Node Beginner Book." - Node runs on V8, the JavaScript engine that underlies Chrome. Thus, there's a command-line interpreter. - On Ubuntu, you run Node programs on the command line. - You can write shell scripts with Node. And for the next week, I amassed a giant bookmarks folder of Node tutorials, blog posts, and general resources. You know, the ones that pop up from extensive googling: StackOverflow answers, Quora answers, nodetuts, the Node wiki, howtonode, you name it. But I just don't get it. I've skimmed the API, I looked through the list of modules, I explored Express (the framework) a bit. And one tiny voice in the back of my head is screaming: what the heck is this all for? The only thing that is complete and tangible to me is Wordsquared. Which is really darn cool, sorta, but I don't really care about multiplayer web scrabble. Maybe it's because I jumped into Node without a proper goal in mind, maybe it's because I'm not all that interested in web apps, and maybe it's just that I'm a f*cking idiot for aimlessly learning programming things. I don't know, this was more of a rant than anything else. I don't think I even have a question to ask. But I think I'm going to do something else in the meantime before school starts. Please comment on something I said if you want. -- Job Board: http://jobs.nodejs.org/ Posting guidelines: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Mailing-List-Posting-Guidelines You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nodejs" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nodejs?hl=en?hl=en
