Beginning Node.js, Express & MongoDB Development

by Greg Lim

In this book, we take you on a fun, hands-on and pragmatic journey to learning Node.js, Express and MongoDB development. You'll start building your first Node.js app within minutes. Every chapter is written in a bite-sized manner and straight to the point as I don’t want to waste your time (and most certainly mine) on the content you don't need. In the end, you will have the skills to create a blog app and deploy it to the Internet.

In the course of this book, we will cover:

Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Introduction to npm & Express
Chapter 3: Beginning our Blog Project
Chapter 4: Templating Engines
Chapter 5: Introduction to MongoDB
Chapter 6: Applying MongoDB to our Project
Chapter 7: Uploading an Image with Express
Chapter 8: Introduction to Express Middleware
Chapter 9: Refactoring to MVC
Chapter 10: User Registration
Chapter 11: User Authentication with Express Sessions
Chapter 12: Showing Validation Errors
Chapter 13: Relating Post Collection with User Collection
Chapter 14: Adding a WYSIWYG Editor
Chapter 15: Using MongoDB Atlas
Chapter 16: Deploying Web Apps on Heroku

The goal of this book is to teach you Node.js, Express and MongoDB development in a manageable way without overwhelming you. We focus only on the essentials and cover the material in a hands-on practice manner for you to code along.

About the Reader

No previous knowledge on Node.js development required, but you should have basic programming knowledge.

About the Author

Greg Lim is a technologist and author of several programming books. Greg has many years in teaching programming in tertiary institutions and he places special emphasis on learning by doing.

Genres: Programming, Computer Science, Technology

153 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 1, 2019

Reviews

[Rexford]

This book contains a step by step guide to starting with Node JS, Express and MongoDB. It uses a lot of really helpful npm packages which are often times used in real projects.

It can certainly be used as a reference for how to do specific things using Express.

[Johan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am going to post a more extensive review here or on my new blog (not yet online).
I have learned a lot by reading/studying this book. Not just about Node.js, Express and MongoDB, but also on how to deploy the database to MongoDB Atlas and the web app to Heroku. I was really looking forward to getting introduced to Heroku and MongoDB Atlas.
I can recommend this book, but don't wait too long to read it, because this technology is in constant and I already got some warnings about deprecated packages.
Given that I found a bit more code errors than I would like, 3 or 3.5 stars seems appropriate.
However, compared to the blogs, online courses and video tutorials that I have read and watched the past couple of months on the topics of Node.js, Express and MongoDB, I will give this book four stars, because it really is significantly better than what is available online.

[Kasparas · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a person with very little knowledge in backend, I found this book quite comprehensive and clear. All stages of web development are covered here, even the later stages of deployment. However, I would’ve liked that containerisation would also be explained as it’s such an important part of webdev these days.

Given how fast web technologies evolve, I have to say that this book held up surprisingly well against time. Only once have I encountered a deprecated feature in the instructions and even that was rather simple to solve.

Overall, I think it’s a great book. Recommended to anyone beginning to learn backend with Node.

[Ben U · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally stumbled on the book that has the MEN stack, that I've been looking for all the while.
The simplicity, clarity, and above all pragmatic approach of this book makes it superb !

Have read MongoDB, Express, and NodeJS. But never been able to connect the dots. With this book, I was able to hit the road and running from day one - on MEN. I'm still on it though.

Absolutely a recommendation for the pragmatic thinking JS web devs.

[Rajen Tandel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great, easy to follow tutorial for NodeJS, Express and Mongo.

[Anil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for beginners + those that want to refresh their knowledge :)
Could have exercises for the readers to tackle + some orthographic mistakes :(

[Why Pool · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love everything in one shot, it gives me a good Foundation for a javascript stack!

I enjoy reading books or the fundamental skills this book was a great starting point to learn how to use a MEN stack, it's a good read.