Check out a free preview of the full Introduction to Node.js, v3 course

The "Wrapping Up" Lesson is part of the full, Introduction to Node.js, v3 course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

Scott wraps up the course by summarizing the CLI app built throughout the lessons. Resources and suggestions for further learning opportunities are also provided in this segment.

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Transcript from the "Wrapping Up" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> As far as the CLI app goes, if we just kind of recap everything that we have here. We created an app that allows us to perform crud on some notes that interacts with a file. And takes advantage of some of the core internal modules like fs and things like that.

[00:00:19]
That we get access to inside of node. We then also interacted with NPM and installed a few things from other developers like Jest, Yargs, Open and created some tests to test some of those things. And then lastly, we created a simple but sophisticated Web server that sends back some server-side HTML that gets interpolated from data from our database.

[00:00:45]
At the end of the day, almost every app you work on, especially web apps, is going to be this. Pulling data from a database, interpolating it in some type of HTML JavaScript framework. That is like every app, period. And everything around that is just trying to figure out how to do that performatively how to do that faster, how to do it cooler.

[00:01:05]
That's it. Like every framework is just this. It's an abstraction around this. So if you understand this at its core, it's fundamental. If some new framework comes out, you'd be like, okay. So how do I interpolate data like it's the same thing you'll just know you'll be able to learn in like a day because you understand the basics.

[00:01:23]
So yeah, that's pretty much everything I wanted to cover as far as things that I wanted to make sure you all saw. But now I want to talk about some next step things that you probably want to look at to help you on your journey as you go further.

[00:01:41]
And I was gonna put them in the notes. Then I got to the notes and I was like, you know what, I'll probably feel different about it without talking about it. So I left it blank. So there's nothing in that page about Recap because I don't know I'm brand new and I like I feel different every day.

[00:01:59]
So some of the things I definitely want you all to look at I mentioned it I'm just gonna show you so you see it with your own eyes is Express.js so check out Express. Highly recommend going here and building out a API server with Express, where you can send back some JSON data.

[00:02:19]
It's the standard, although I will admit that there are newer, faster server frameworks out there, but it doesn't matter. This isn't going to production. You don't need to learn every framework. Just pick one that makes sense to you and try to build something with it. And have fun.

[00:02:35]
I would say Express, there's probably more resources out there. There's more things to Google, there's more videos to watch. So for me learning something is all about the accumulation of resources that are available to me. It's harder to learn something with less resources, even though it might be easy to learn.

[00:02:49]
Trying to learn Elixir which is really difficult. It is difficult because there's not a lot of resources out there, but the language itself is not that difficult. But good luck googling something on Elixir. So, yeah, ExpressJS, build an application with it. I also recommend checking out replacing what we did with the files.

[00:03:12]
But with a database. So you could pretty much pick any database you want. I don't really have like any strong recommendations on which ones you should or shouldn't do, but some of the top ones might be like Postgres or Mongo or MySQL. Just pick one of those databases and swap out the files that we did with the database and your choice of an ORM.

[00:03:35]
A really good ORM is Prisma is probably like the go to standard out there. Everyone uses this to model their database and do different things. So highly recommend checking that out. I would also recommend publishing something to NPM. So how to Publish a NPM package you can even take the thing that we made and publish it to NPM.

[00:04:06]
It's like two commands it's really simple to do. But highly recommend just putting something on NPM that's got your name on it, even though no one will ever use it. But just so you go through that flow and you feel it, you're like, wow, I put something out there on the internet and just put it out there.

[00:04:20]
So highly recommend that. Yes.
>> And we have of course, created an open source JavaScript library on GitHub that talks about publishing NPM as well.
>> There you go. That's the one, so do that. And then also check out TypeScript if you haven't less about node, but more just about that's just what everyone's using.

[00:04:43]
And then last thing would be, take a little more advanced course I know we have the API, design course here that I also taught. So check out that one if you want to take this and go a step further and make a full blown JSON API that will like deploy somewhere.

[00:05:01]
Check out that course. We pretty much cover everything in there from Prisma, Postgres, like all these different things. We'll keep it up to date. That one I do go into more depth, but that also just means like you should check out like deploying something. So make a server, deploy it somewhere.

[00:05:14]
Getting something to work on your machine is one thing. Getting it to work on AWS or Digital ocean or wherever you want to deploy it is completely different. So check that out as well. Other than that, yeah, just, I would highly recommend just going in and trying to, I don't know, build small automations that you could leverage in your personal life, your day to day.

[00:05:38]
For instance, some of the things that I built early on were like, I would use test end to end testing frameworks that would simulate user interaction. To go online and automatically find me shoes or pay my bills, because I didn't feel like opening a browser to do it.

[00:05:52]
So I would have the script go and do it. Can you open the browser and go check this Nike website every hour, and then text me if the shoes are in stock? So it would. And I would just leave my computer running and it would go do that.

[00:06:05]
Right, or just like you open a browser and on the 15th of every month or whatever, go pay this Internet bill for me. Here's my credit card information and it will go do it, right? So yeah, just try things out. Try to have fun with it, something that inspires you.

[00:06:20]
We didn't talk about it, but you can make API calls from your server to other servers and get data, right. So you can there's not a limit to what you can do. So yeah, have fun with it. Other than that, it was a pleasure. Thank you everybody. Thanks for taking the course.

[00:06:36]
[APPLAUSE]

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