I've dabbled with Node a bit prior to this book. I've also been writing large scale JavaScript applications for a while so most of the concepts in this book are not new to me.
What this very short book provided me is a crash course in how to use Node to spin up a web server from scratch. Being familiar with both client side and server side development, my experience with Node already surpassed this book; however, reflecting on how the author steps a person through the process without any frameworks (initially) is nice to see.
There were a couple things that I didn't like about this book:
1. It's short because it assumes a lot. The author writes assuming the reader has knowledge of working with maintainable, large scale JavaScript code on the client side; however, from working with the dev community, I'd say this is actually a minority. While the PubSub pattern of development has been around for a while, I do not know many JavaScript developers that would be able to show an example of such.
2. Some subtopics feel forced. The author focuses a lot of a number of different technologies in addition to Node. Socket.Io, Redis, Jade, Express, Require.JS, and Backbone are the major ones. While the information is good, how they were added feels more like an after thought to increase the page count. These additional subtopics also made the flow a bit off to me. We have building with Node from scratch, then using Connect, then we talk about Mustache and instead of keeping with structure, it jumps to Socket.Io and then Redis. I understand the rationale since Backbone and Express were used to illustrate a "putting it all together"-like chapter on MVC, it still felt off.
3. One of the biggest things I hoped to get out the book was understanding module creation better and specifically how to possibly share modules between client and server. Thankfully, this was addressed on the last page of the book; however, how to package a module to be submitted for NPM wasn't. This is more of me having higher expectations on the information in the book than what's truly in there.
Would I recommend this book? - Absolutely.
Was I the target audience for this book? - Probably not since I had already been playing around with Node prior to reading it.
If you are a front end developer with very little knowledge of server side development - this book will be a decent fit for you. If you have decent knowledge of both sides of development and multiple different environments (i.e. .Net, Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Django, etc) then you may not get as much out of this book.
