Distributed Systems with Node.js: Building Enterprise-Ready Backend Services

I’ve only made it to chapter 5 and I’ve already learned so much. Learning more about the JavaScript event loop, the multi-threaded lower levels, load balancing, testing, it’s all great information. I would consider myself of intermediate knowledge with JavaScript/node and this has taught me many new things and refreshed/furthered my knowledge on topics I already knew. Great book that I think anyone with a basic knowledge and above of JavaScript and node can learn from.

I've been writing node for years, but it's changed in the past few years, and I haven't kept up. Also, a lot of stuff I and my colleagues have written i would class as "amateur" or "garage shop." (sorry, colleagues)Now that's I've been through this book, (actually, not finished yet) I feel that I know how node programs can fit into an ecosystem, and not surprise my clients. (Meaning human business people, not programs.)Also, the book is written at exactly my level, and at a pace that keeps me engaged and not bored or overwhelmed. Anybody who has written some node programs, will maybe have a similar experience.?Finally, I enjoy the writer's sense of humor. Some might say: What sense of humor? But I can see his eyes twinkling as he writes certain things. Have you know any technologists who get very excited about what they are building? So excited that they're annoying? I really enjoy people like this. Mr. Hunter is such a one.

This book provides an excellent hands-on introduction to backend, distributed-systems development. Although many of the examples are built around simple Node.js servers, the book is mostly about distributed systems more broadly. Anyone wishing to gain a solid understanding of backend systems development would do well to read this book, even if their preferred stack didn't include Node.js.

We've struggled to scale Node internally and this book was our ticket to success. It's always nice to find a book that covers all bases.

This author was highly recommended to me by a friend, I bought several books, and its been pretty disappointing. There is a wide range of topics included in this book, sort of in an attempt to highlight all of the tech you'd ever encounter in a Node.js stack. But the book is lacking in clear strategies. Basically covers a wide range of topics, but lacks depth of topics.

The content of the book is good, but the cover was bent and damaged upon arrival.

Waste of money, paper and time. Just go read few blogs and you'll get more

This is a great book - it's just not exactly what I expected. I was really hoping for a deep coding book with lots of patterns and implementation examples of code specifically for writing Node microservices, dealing with distributed architecture challenges, etc.This book does have lots of code samples, and they're all pretty good. But it turns out that at least half of the code (and half of the book overall) really applies to any Node apps of any architecture (even a monolith). For example, the chapters on Observability (using Elasticsearch/ELK/etc.), Deployment (using Travis CI, Heroku, etc.) and Security are totally universal to any Node app.Several other chapters are also not really about Node or distributed apps, per se, but focus on important external technologies in the wider ecosystem, and how Node can integrate with them (ex: Docker, Redis, HAProxy, PostgreSQL, etc...). This gets into both client libs in Node (with numerous code samples), but also a fair amount of general discussion about theory and architecture (what is a reverse proxy/cache server/data store, and how/why would you use it with your Node app? What are containers, and how do you build and run them in Docker CLI? What is Kubernetes, and how do you deploy your containers to it? etc...). All of that is good stuff, and well written, it's just not so much about Node itself.For me the 2 most valuable chapters were:Ch. #1) The author does a really good explanation of the Node internal V8 event loop, with minute details about _exactly_when_ the various different asynchronous events and built in functions fire and are handled (ex: setTimeout vs setInterval vs setImmediate, etc.)Ch. #8) Resilience - This is the best chapter, which goes over a bunch of valuable tips/tricks/best practices that will help your Node apps either withstand runtime failures, or else fail gracefully and predictably. For me, this chapter alone was worth the cover price. It may have nothing new for really senior Node pros, but for mid-level devs it's great (and even you ninjas might learn a thing or two).I pulled a star from my rating because this book sacrifices depth into Node code examples and distributed architecture to cover such a broad range of material. That said, everything it does cover is well done, easy to understand, and may be much more valuable to someone newer to all this than I am.Honestly, any serious Node dev will benefit from reading this book overall, in my opinion. Now you know exactly what to expect. ;-)

This book just lists technologies and frameworks that are used around Node.js. Every chapter is a "Hello world" introduction to each of them. So, the only useful thing inside it is the Table of Contents.