Understanding Node.js: Core Concepts

Let's do a quick walkthrough about what you will accomplish after completing some of the sections:

Understanding Buffers: Here, we will deeply understand buffers and how to work directly with binary data, which is essential for all the other sections.

Understanding File System: As a back-end developer, you'll work with files a lot, be it saving some data to disk, handling file uploads and many other examples, so it's essential to have a good understanding of them, which you'll gain after completing this section. We'll also learn how Node.js deals with files and master the "fs" module.

Understanding Streams: In this section, we're going to master Streams, which will allow us to develop highly-performant apps capable of handling terabytes of data with ease while having great memory usage. We'll build many mini-projects throughout the section, including an encryption-decryption app from scratch that could encrypt terabytes of data by directly modifying the binary data. This section lays the foundation for future sections where we'll utilize Streams heavily to create powerful and efficient network applications.

Understanding Networking: Node.js was primarily designed to create network applications, so it's of utmost importance that we gain a decent understanding of networking, which we will do after completing this section. Here's a list of items we'll learn in this section:

• What exactly a network is
• How the internet works
• Mac Addresses
• IPV4 & IPv6 Addresses
• TCP
• UDP
• DNS
• Fundamentals of deployment

We'll build 2 low-level apps using only Node.js, a chat and a file uploader app directly on top of TCP! And then, we'll deploy them to a Linux server in the most basic way without using unnecessary tools.

We'll see exactly what happens in our network card, every single 0s and 1s exchanged for a particular thing using Wireshark, and gain a much better understanding of networking and how most of the well-known protocols like HTTP, FTP, Email protocols, SSH, DNS and many others work. This section will broaden your horizons, and you'll realize that there are far more things that you can do with Node.js than just creating web servers.

Understanding HTTP: In this section, we'll utilize and combine all that we've learned from previous sections and finally deeply understand HTTP once and for all! We won't be learning how to use Express; instead, we will build something similar ourselves!

We'll start by understanding the most important HTTP concepts, such as connection types, client-server model, messages, requests, responses, HTTP Methods, status codes, mime types, necessary headers and so much more. And then emulate an HTTP protocol directly on top of TCP using the net module and see precisely every single 0s and 1s that get exchanged for an HTTP request and response interaction!

Once we understand the fundamentals of HTTP and the "http" module, we'll take things to the next level and start building our framework. And then, using our framework, we'll make a fully functional web application.

This section will take your web development skills to the next level. You'll have a much better understanding of how all these popular NPM packages, like Express, body-parser, Multer, cors, etc., that are built on top of the "http" module work. Well, you'll learn how to make them from scratch, just using them will not be that much of a problem!