Category: Burningbird

Categories
Books Writing

Changing course

Learning Node will be my last book for O’Reilly, at least for the foreseeable future.

Learning Node was a particularly exhausting book. Not only is there much to cover in one book, Node is a very dynamic technology. I like to think my coverage is both comprehensive and solid, but I guess we’ll see how the book does when it hits the streets.

In the next year, I’m going to enter the ranks of the self-published. I’m also focusing less on technology, and more on other areas of interest. What these areas are will become evident over the next several months.

My next book won’t be on technology, and I’m not sure that the one after will be on technology, either. I’m not saying Learning Node is my last book on technology, but I am most definitely taking a break from the tech book field. Most tech writers will understand when I write about the challenges in providing decent and accurate code examples for a new or changing technology, at the same time you’re trying to ensure that your grammar is correct, and your prose is clear and readable. Not only do you have to worry about your comma use in your text, you also have to worry about comma use in your code.

Just when you finally punch all the code, screen grabs, and text into a comprehensive whole, you’re then faced with an audience that’s just as likely to tell you it’s not interested in buying a book when they can find the material online, and for free.

I’m one of the lucky tech writers in that all but a couple of my books have earned out the advances, and provided relatively decent royalties. I’m not a bestselling author, but to earn out advances on 20 books isn’t bad in the tech field. At the same time, though, I’m not making it as a writer, and I have to try something new. That, or see if the local McDonald’s is hiring, because my days of tech contracting are over.

I plan on being as innovative as possible with my self-published works. For one, I don’t see any of the books being very large. Electronic publishing opens the doors for focused, shorter works, attractively priced. By attractively priced I mean that I don’t see any of my books priced at more than $5.00. In fact, I envision a Starbucks pricing model, with book prices comparable to prices you’d pay for a Starbucks coffee: smaller books will be equivalent to the price for a tall latte; larger, more complex works, closer to the price for a venti Caramel Macciato.

Lower prices and shorter works does not mean the books won’t be solid. My first self-published book is on a topic I’ve been researching for three years. But it’s a focused topic: too big for a Kindle Singles, and way too small for a more traditional book. It’s a topic that greatly interests me, and I think that’s the most important consideration.

Of course, I still have to worry about grammar and the damn commas, but at least I don’t have to worry about code.

Categories
Technology Writing

Node: References and Resources

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

During my explorations of Node.js, I came across many excellent resources, references, tutorials, and various other online publications related to the technology. I had planned on incorporating this material into an appendix for Learning Node but decided it would make a better online resource than a book chapter.

Every person interested in Node should start with the Node.js web site, as well as the web site for npm, the application that manages Node module installations:

If you’re interested in Node in a Windows environment, you might a little extra help in getting set up. I recommend the following resources:

There’s an enormous number of resources for the Node.js newbie, including basic tutorials and entire online books. I know there are more than what I discovered, but the following is a good start:

One person, Felix Geisendörfer, has provided several excellent online resources for new and experienced Node folks:

As you learn Node, you’ll hear about the Node event loop. The following are a couple of good articles on the event loop:

REPL is the Node interactive stand alone application. REPL stands for Read-Eval-Print-Loop. Following are good REPL resources:

Modules are the heart and soul of Node.js. It can be an interesting experience finding Modules, because you need to look carefully among the many available to see which are the ones currently supported, and which have, more or less, been abandoned. Luckily, there are good Node module resources:

A good rule of thumb about which module to use is check for recent activity in the module’s repository. Are there outstanding issues? Pull requests that have gone unanswered for a long time? Also do a Google search, see who is using the module, for what, and how recently.

For more on npm, itself, do check out the Developer guide. Also spend some time understanding the differences between global and local installation of modules.

Node is based on the CommonJS model. If you want to learn more about CommonJS, I recommend Taking baby steps with Node.js–CommonJS and creating custom modules.

The heart of the module system is the package.json file. Nodejitsu provides an article and a couple of good cheat sheets related to package.json and npm:

Peter Krumin did a great series of articles on Node.js Modules you should know about. Several of my favorite are included in the list.

If you work with Node, and you write modules, chances are you’re going to become intimately involved with EventEmitter. The following are good EventEmitter resources and references:

Control flow is a big topic of interest for Node developers:

There are good frameworks for Node, but I focused on Connect/Express. I felt that Express was more Node-like, and requires less upfront time than the other frameworks. That’s not to say there weren’t challenges with Express, as it went from Express 2.x to Express 3.x and then back down to Express 2.x, but one adapts. I focused on Express 3 in the book.

Connect is the middleware layer for Express. TJ Holowaychuk provides an introduction to Connect 2 at Connect 2.0. The Express web site is at Express.com, though note that the documentation is still focused on Express 2. For the Express 2 developer, check out the Migrating from 2.x to 3.x guide. Mike Valstar writes specifically about Express error handling and 404 pages.

I grew fond of Redis when working with Node.js. The Redis site is at redis.io. Redis is nicely documented, at the site and in the Little Redis Book.

Following are other articles and links of interest, in no particular order or grouping:

Hack Sparrow article on running Express application in a production environment http://www.hacksparrow.com/running-express-js-in-production-mode.html. Charlie Robbins provides a how-to on distributing Node.js apps with Hook.io at http://blog.nodejitsu.com/distribute-nodejs-apps-with-hookio. More on the Hook.io module at http://ejeklint.github.com/2011/09/23/hook.io-for-dummies-part-1-overview/.

Rasmus Andersson wrote a Template for setting up Node.js-backed web apps on EC2 at http://rsms.me/2011/03/23/ec2-wep-app-template.html. Another writing on setting up Node on Amazon EC2 from Ben Nadel at http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2321-How-I-Got-Node-js-Running-On-A-Linux-M….

A XSS (Cross Site Scripting) Cheat Sheet can be found at http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html. Another cheat sheet, this time on SQL Injection at http://ferruh.mavituna.com/sql-injection-cheatsheet-oku/.

Heroku provides instructions on how to create a self-signed SSL certificate at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/ssl-certificate-self. Another tutorial on the same subjec. at http://www.akadia.com/services/ssh_test_certificate.html.

I don’t cover backbone.js in the book, but an article on combing it with MongoDB, Mongoose, and Restify can be read at http://backbonetutorials.com/nodejs-restify-mongodb-mongoose/.

A comparison of Redis and Cassandra http://hammerprinciple.com/databases/items/redis/cassandra. More on Apache Cassandra at http://cassandra.apache.org/. Redis is compared with Memcached at http://webdevrefinery.com/forums/topic/8221-memcached-vs-redis/. The Memcached web site is at http://memcached.org/.

Guillermo Rauch’s Use Jade Blocks, not Layouts, at http://www.devthought.com/code/use-jade-blocks-not-layouts/.

Curl is your friend when testing RESTful applications. Some helpful examples at http://www.yilmazhuseyin.com/blog/dev/curl-tutorial-examples-usage/.
The Ruby on Rails routing guide applies equally well to Node: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html.

Charlie McConnell wrote an article on “How to use stream.pipe” at http://docs.nodejitsu.com/articles/advanced/streams/how-to-use-stream-pipe.

One of the better, more thorough answers I’ve seen at Stack Overflow is the answer to “What is the Difference between proxy server and reverse proxy server” at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/224664/difference-between-proxy-serve….

Guillermo Rauch wrote a multipart tweet filtering proxy, beginning with Part 1 at http://www.devthought.com/2012/01/24/filtering-tweets-for-your-favorite-….

Shravya Garlapati at LinkedIn, wrote a very helpful article, Blazing Fast node.js: 10 performance tips from LinkedIn Mobile http://engineering.linkedin.com/nodejs/blazing-fast-nodejs-10-performanc….

The Async module can be found at https://github.com/caolan/async. More on the creation of Async at http://caolanmcmahon.com/posts/asynchronous_code_in_node_js.

The Step module is located at https://github.com/creationix/step.
There is promise support in Node with Q at https://github.com/kriskowal/q, and deferred https://github.com/medikoo/deferred, as well as Futures https://github.com/coolaj86/futures.

Yes, you can use Node modules with client-side JavaScript with help from RequireJS at http://requirejs.org/. And you can scrape web pages using Node, jQuery, and Jsdom, with a little help from this article http://liamkaufman.com/blog/2012/03/08/scraping-web-pages-with-jquery-no….

Since Node is based on the CommonJS model, read more about CommonJS at http://www.commonjs.org/. An interesting article on Node, CommonJS, and custom modules by Jan Van Ryswyck can be found at http://elegantcode.com/2011/02/04/taking-baby-steps-with-node-js-commonj….

A Nodejitsu article on using the Process module can be found at http://docs.nodejitsu.com/articles/getting-started/the-process-module. More on Node and processes by at http://dailyjs.com/2012/03/22/unix-node-processes/.

More on TCP Socket Programming in Node.js at http://www.hacksparrow.com/tcp-socket-programming-in-node-js.html. A general article on TCP vs. UDP can be found at http://www.skullbox.net/tcpudp.php. More on UDP Networking at http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/current/core/howto/udp.html.

If you’re curious about the performance differences between using process.nextTick and setTimeout, you can view benchmark tests at https://gist.github.com/1257394.

Categories
Books

Learning Node: Raw

Evidently, O’Reilly is going to publish my Learning Node book as a Rough Cuts/Early Release.

What people should know is that the material has not gone through a final edit, a copy edit, or a tech review. So yes, there will be typos, gotchas, and oopsies. Probably lots and lots of oopsies. But the advantage to getting a Rough Cut is you get the work early, but still get the finished product when it’s complete.

I decided not to have an Appendix with all the links. This kind of material doesn’t really suit a book; it’s more appropriate for a web page. I’m in the process of converting this rich material into an online source page, which I’ll post at Tech at Burningbird when finished.

I’ll also publish a “lessons learned” from the book. Bottom line, though, is that I like Node. I think it really fills a need. What I love most about Node are child processes. I had a lot of fun with these during the book’s development. I’m definitely fond of child processes—that, and how easy it is to install and incorporate modules. The whole infrastructure just cuts through so much server-side cruft. I don’t like server-side cruft. There’s a reason I’m not a C or C++ developer.

I’ve also become a real fan girl of Redis. We have needed a Redis for years. I’m also more amenable to web sockets now, especially since the security issues have been addressed.

Categories
Just Shelley

Suggests for a smart phone

I’m finally leaving my cave and buying a real, live smart phone.

I left the Apple world over a year ago, so I’m looking at buying an Android phone. I want one that comes with Ice Cream Sandwich. Hopefully a phone that doesn’t get stuck with one version of an OS for years and years.

Any suggestions for a phone? Any suggestions for a carrier/plan, here in the US? Anything I should be wary of?

Categories
Writing

Learning Node: Well, one Rails aside

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

After denouncing the use of Ruby and Rails terms to describe Node and Node modules, I must now confess that I did use a Rails resource in the section on MVC in Chapter 6.

The Rails Guide has an absolutely beautifully written overview on MVC and routing, Rails Routing from the Outside In, I used as inspiration for the design of the MVC section in Chapter 6.

However, in my defense I’ll note that most of this overview really doesn’t depend on knowing either Ruby or Rails in order to benefit from the writing. It simply and easily demonstrates a mapping between HTTP verbs, routes, controller actions, and database CRUD (Create-Read-Update-Delete) probably better than anything else I’ve ever read.