Functional Design Patterns for Express.js: A step-by-step guide to building elegant, maintainable Node.js backends

by Jonathan Lee Martin

Learn the design patterns that transcend Express.js and recur throughout high-quality production codebases, with a step-by-step approach that teaches by doing. Wonderfully entertaining and illuminating. Guaranteed to induce frequent “ah-ha!” moments. Easily one of the best treatments of backend programming with Node.js. — Chris Aquino, author of Front-End Web The Big Nerd Ranch Guide Express is arguably the ubiquitous library for building Node backends. As of mid-2019, it is a dependency of 3.75 million codebases on Github alone. So if you hop into a Node codebase, chances are Express is part of it. Good design in an Express.js backend is good design anywhere. The patterns you learn to develop Node backends will outlive Express and influence your design approaches in unrelated platforms. Searching for an Express.js primer that isn’t another screencast or exhaustive reference guide? Whether you’re a seasoned backend developer, frontend developer or recent web bootcamp graduate, this is the guide for you. This book focuses on best practice, conventional backend design for pure backend APIs. As we build a full-featured backend together, expect You should have a strong hands-on foundation in JavaScript and Node.js, You don’t need prior backend experience. If you understand how servers and clients interact, experience from either side of the equation is sufficient.

Genres: Programming

137 pages, Paperback

Published June 24, 2019

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned about this book while interviewing Jonathan on a podcast and bought it immediately, but have only now had the time to get to it. While I was already familiar with Express, the clear, concise tutorials in this book were nonetheless interesting and informative. If you're already an Express expert, you may not find much here that's new, but if you're looking to get into back-end development, particularly web server development, this is an excellent resource.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book on a whim during a PragProg sale. After opening the book and skimming through, I was disappointed at the short length (126 pages) and the seemingly misleading title (I'm not sure "Functional Design Patterns" is what most people would have expected), but having completed the book, I think it's a worthwhile purchase for someone getting into backend javascript.

The book is project based (each chapter builds upon the same app) narrowly focusing on HTTP, routing, middleware, authentication and authorization with minimal 3rd party packages (no Passport.js). If you're already familiar with Express, this book might not be for you but it does do a good job of showing idiomatic code with some interesting patterns and refactorings mostly related to middleware (some practical examples of currying to inject variable behavior into middleware). I wasn't totally new to Express so I decided to additionally TDD my way through using supertest, which I found to be good practice.

I'm a fan of project based books (as opposed to ones that hopscotch through various code examples) so I think this is better than Express In Action (seems like the closest competitor). My main criticism is that it's too short; most PragProg books are twice as long for the same price. The quality is definitely up to par though.

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairly shallow but that's to be expected from a book focused on a minimal framework. It highlighted some interesting patterns I wasn't familiar with (policy/enforce, for example). It's a quick read and I took away enough to make it worthwhile.