Jump Start CoffeeScript – A quick guide for experienced programmers – #programming #bookreview

Jump Start CoffeeScript
Earle Castledine
(SitePoint – paperback, Kindle)

CoffeeScript is a fun yet “serious” computer language. It is, declares the coffeescript.org website, “a little language that compiles into JavaScript. Underneath that awkward Java-esque patina, JavaScript has always had a gorgeous heart. CoffeeScript is an attempt to expose the good parts of JavaScript in a simple way.”

And therein rubs a lie, to re-coin a very old phrase. Many beginners somehow get the notion that they can take up CoffeeScript as a cool way to avoid learning JavaScript.

It is not. Your compiled code from CoffeeScript is in JavaScript, and how, exactly, do you plan to debug it if you don’t know JavaScript? (Also, a key goal of CoffeeScript is to help you learn to write better JavaScript.)

Which brings us to Jump Start CoffeeScript by Earle Castledine. This is an entertaining yet serious programming book that promises, on its cover, to show you how to “get up to speed with CoffeeScript in a weekend.”

Repeat after me: This is not a book for computer beginners, nor anyone seeking to skate around a requirement to learn JavaScript.

Castledine’s 151-page book quickly takes you, in just one chapter, from “Hello CoffeeScript!” to beginning the process of building a computer game. And, the author promises, it’s “[n]ot just the outer husk of a boring space-based shoot ‘em up, but a complete, extensible HTML5 game with tile maps, particle effects, AI, and (of course) Ninjas.”

Despite the “weekend” tagline on the cover, the book is written in part as a story in which you have one week to develop and deliver the HTML5 game as a software product. But (spoiler alert!), you will, miraculously, finish the process one day early. (This seldom happens in real-life software development.)

If you are comfortable with JavaScript, HTML and computers, Castledine’s book can provide you with an enjoyable, challenging, and useful way to learn CoffeeScript. (You will also need to have Node.js installed, so you can use npm, Node’s package manager for modules, to download and install the coffee-script module — the hyphen is required here.)

If you are not comfortable with the aforementioned qualifications, here’s another warning. To keep the book short, almost every code example is presented as an excerpt. The full pieces of code are contained within a downloadable code archive. While using the book, you are expected to open specific files and add specific lines of code. And exactly where in the file you are supposed to add them seldom is spelled out in good detail. Basically, you are supposed to know this stuff already.

For example, in Chapter 1, you are told to “Plop a canvas element into your web page using a unique ID….”

First, you have to realize that the presented excerpt is part of a particular index.html file that will become an introductory project’s web page. And as for precisely where to plop that piece of code, you just have to know. In the very next sentence, you are told: “Now we need to grab a reference to its drawing context via CoffeeScript….” This is followed by another code excerpt, and: “If you’re compiling this code with coffee, it needs to be in a separate file, compiled, then included in the web page.” And so forth.

If you don’t know what to do without further instruction, prepare to be confused.

The author is a well-known JavaScript expert who’s very good with CoffeeScript, too. And, the goal of this SitePoint book is to quickly get you up to speed with CoffeeScript.

You will get up to speed–if you possess some programming experience, know some JavaScript and HTML, and can follow the author’s instructions without needing basic 1-2-3, a-b-c steps.

– Si Dunn

Jump Start Node.js – A well-written guide for learning Node.js quickly – #programming #bookreview

 Jump Start Node.js
Don Nguyen
(SitePoint – paperback, Kindle)

Don Nguyen’s well-written Node.js book has been in print for a few months and is an excellent text for learning how to put Node.js to work in fast, scalable real-time web applications.

You should have some experience with JavaScript before tackling Node.js. But Nguyen says a “server-side engineer who uses another language such as PHP, Python, Ruby, Java, or .NET” can pick up enough JavaScript from his book to get a good feel for its syntax and idiosyncratic features.

What I like most about the book is how it  jumps right into developing a dynamic working Node.js application that you deploy to a production server. The project is a real-time stock market trading engine that streams live prices into a web browser. Along the way, you learn how to set up and use a NoSQL database (with MongoDB), you learn some functional programming techniques, and you work with Ajax, Express, Mocha, Socket.io, Backbone.js, Twitter Bootstrap, GitHub and Heroku.

The author covers a lot of ground, with clear code examples and good explanations, in just 154 pages. “The main goal of this book,” he notes, “is to transfer the skill set rather than the actual project into the real world. There is a narrow domain of ‘hard’ real-time applications such as a stock exchange where specialized software and hardware are required because microseconds count. However, there is a much larger number of ‘soft’ real-time applications such as Facebook, Twitter, and eBay where microseconds are of small consequence. This is Node.js’s speciality, and you’ll understand how to build these types of applications by the end of this book.”

Note: If you are a Windows user, you will have to install Cygwin before you can start using the Mocha testing framework on page 23. If you use Mac OS X, you will need to have the Xcode Command Line Tools installed. More information related to the book can be found at this SitePoint forum.

– Si Dunn

Learning Node – A good how-to guide for server-side Web development with Node.js – #programming #bookreview

Learning Node
Shelley Powers
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

 “Node is designed to be used for [server-side] applications that are heavy on input/output (I/O), but light on computation,” veteran Web technology author Shelley Powers notes in Learning Node, her ninth and newest how-to book from O’Reilly.

“Node.js,” she explains, “is a server-side technology that’s based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. It’s a highly scalable system that uses asynchronous, event-driven I/O (input/output), rather than threads or separate processes. “It’s ideal for web applications that are frequently accessed but computationally simple.”

I’ve criticized some previous Node books (1) for assuming that all of their readers know a lot about Node.js and assorted programming languages and (2) for not giving enough step-by-step installation and start-up information.

Happily, Learning Node is well written, nicely illustrated with code samples and screen shots, and assumes only that you have some working familiarity with JavaScript. It gives a detailed overview of how to set up development environments in Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows 7. “Installation on a Mac should be similar to installation on Linux,” the author adds.

One caveat regarding code examples: “Most were tested in a Linux environment, but should work, as is, in any Node environment.”

The 374-page book has 16 chapters. The first five “cover both getting Node and the package manager (npm) installed , how to use them, creating your first applications, and utilizing modules.”

Shelley Powers notes that she incorporates “the use of the Express framework, which also utilizes the Connect middleware, throughout the book.” So if you have little or no experience with Express, you will need to pay attention to chapters 6 through 8. But: “After these foundation chapters, you can skip around a bit,” she adds.

Some of the additional chapters cover key/value pairs, using MongoDb with Node, and working with Node’s relational database bindings.

Two chapters get into specialized application use. “Chapter 12 focuses purely on graphics and media access, including how to provide media for the new HTML5 video element, as well as working with PDF documents and Canvas,” the author points out. “Chapter 13 covers the very popular Sockets.io module, especially for working with the new web socket functionality.”

The final chapters are crucial, particularly if you want to move from learning Node to working in a production environment. Chapter 14 covers “Testing and Debugging Node Applications.” Chapter 15 “covers issues of security and authority…it is essential that you spend time in this chapter before you roll a Node application out for general use.”

Meanwhile, Chapter 16 describes “how to prepare your application for production use, including how to deploy your Node application not only on your own system , but also in one of the cloud servers that are popping up to host Node applications.”

Learning Node is both an excellent overall introduction to Node.js and a how-to reference guide that you will want to keep close at hand as you develop and deploy Node applications.

– Si Dunn

For more information: Node.js, paperback, Kindle

Node: Up and Running – A fine intro to Node.js, the new 799-pound gorilla in the room – #programming #bookreview #in

Node: Up and Running
Tom Hughes-Croucher and Mike Wilson
(O’Reilly, paperback, list price $34.99; Kindle edition, list price $27.99)

Node.js is often described as “the dominant player” in the world of server-side JavaScript development. Whether that’s completely true or boastful hype, big players such as Google, LinkedIn, eBay, Walmart and Microsoft now are using it. And so are countless smaller players and startups. If Node.js is not yet King Kong, it has at least grown into a 799-pound, but reasonably tame, programming gorilla for those who want to write scalable server-side code using JavaScript.

In today’s weird, challenging job market for programmers, it would not hurt you to feed this new gorilla a few bananas and gain at least passing familiarity with it. You never know when you may need to ramp up some Node.js skills in a hurry, to get or keep a job or land a contract.

I like O’Reilly’s “Up and Running” book series for that very ramp-up reason. They do a good job of introducing a programming language and showing how to use key aspects of it. And they point you to additional resources for skills and knowledge you can pick up on the fly.

According to the two authors of Node: Up and Running,“Node.js is many things, but mostly it’s a way of running JavaScript outside the web browser.” They add: “Many people use the JavaScript programming language extensively for programming the interfaces of websites. Node.js allows this popular programming language to be applied in many more contexts, in particular on web servers. There are several notable features about Node.js that make it worthy of interest.”

For example: “Node is a wrapper around the high-performance V8 JavaScript runtime from the Google Chrome browser. Node tunes V8 to work better in contexts other than the browser, mostly by providing additional APIs that are optimized for specific use cases.”

The two authors point out that “JavaScript is an event-driven language, and Node uses this to its advantage to produce highly scalable servers. Using an architecture called an event loop, Node makes programming highly scalable servers both easy and safe.” Node.js also features non-blocking I/O.

Node.js “runs on Windows, Linux, Mac, and other POSIX OSes (such as Solaris and BSD),” the authors state. And this is the second Node book I’ve reviewed that claims the installation process is “extremely simple.” The previous book did not give enough information for beginners. This one follows “extremely simple” with instructions and screen displays spread across nearly four pages. But – a hurried beginner may miss this at first – the steps are only for those who choose to do a source install rather than use one of the Node.js installer links.

The first time I used a Windows link to install Node.js (trying to follow the previous book), I somehow ended up with stuff scattered and duplicated in several subdirectories  –. an “extremely simple” mess.)  This time, my installation did seem “simple,” if not quite “extremely simple.” (Once it completed, I had to go to a command prompt and run “node” rather than just click on a brand new Windows icon — my definition of “extremely simple.” )

Of course, you are expected to have some JavaScript knowledge and programming experience before tackling this book, so you may not want to get ahead of yourself on the learning curve. If you’re currently a JavaScript novice, put this one on the shelf for a little bit later. But definitely get it.

Node: Up and Running offers plenty of code examples, and the paragraphs between them are well-written and kept reasonably short. Thus, knowledge and skills can be gained in manageable small chunks. Only a few other illustrations are offered, and, unfortunately, they tend to be more goofy than helpful.

The 184-page book has eight chapters:

1. A Very Brief Introduction to Node.js
2. Doing Interesting Things
3. Building Robust Node Applications
4. Core APIs
5. Helper APIs
6. Data Access
7. Important External Modules
8. Extending Node

Some readers have noted that this book does not contain the traditional appendix giving links and referrals to other sources of more information on Node.js, and that’s a fair criticism. However, the book’s Chapter 6, “Data Access,” does have links to, and discussions of, “the basic ways to connect to common open source database choices and to store and retrieve data.” The topics covered include using Node.js with CouchDb, Redis, MongoDB and relational databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL. The chapter also looks at connection pooling and message queuing (MQ) protocol.

“The Node project is still very young,” the two authors state, “and yet rarely have we seen such fervor around a project. Both novices and experts have coalesced around the project to use and contribute to Node, making it both a pleasure to explore and a supportive place to share and get advice.”

Their new book, Node: Up and Running, can help you get friendly fast with this new 799-pound gorilla in the room, Node.js.

– Si Dunn

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