Getting started with Node.js

This semester I'm teaching a new class, CSE398: Large Scale Software Development.  The goal of the class is to provide students with a hands-on experience designing and implementing bigger programs than they see in a typical class.  My informal informal motto is "If you need to have a database and a web site, that's not two projects... it's half a project, because you don't have a desktop or mobile component."

That may seem trite, but my feeling is that it's important to use other people's APIs, to connect software components that are implemented in different languages, and to understand that real-world software must be thought of as a large set of loosely connected components.

I'm also hopeful that this will be a great laboratory for learning about technical debt.  In particular, I'm hoping that students will cut corners early in the semester, and then have nobody but themselves to blame when they return to that code later in the semester.  We shall see how it goes.

Anyway, with all of that exposition out of the way, I'll note that a few weeks back, I put together a tutorial on how to do all the basic web things (forms, REST, connect to MongoDB, push notifications) that people do with Node.js.  The tutorial is publicly available through this link.

There are a few bugs in the tutorial, so if you notice anything incorrect, please let me know in the comments, so I can make corrections.

You'll also note that each tutorial has some "next steps", which I expect the students to do without my close guidance.  This is meant to encourage learning about how to teach oneself from on-line tutorials, and also how to evaluate on-line resources.  For what it's worth, I think the scotch.io tutorial series on passport.js is pretty good.