Recently, I've been working a full-time job as a hydroponic farmer, working to keep up with my fitness goals and coding. It's hard when most of your time is already spread out over so many activities. I've been looking to try and learn new technologies as I continue to sharpen my current skills. After a while of second guessing, I decided to take the plunge into node.js. I'm learning some pretty cool things as I go through this udemy course.

So...what is node exactly? The official node js doc describes node as 'a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine.' An easier, and probably over simplified, way to think about node is that it is a tool that allows you to run javascript outside of a browser. This allows us the ability to create back-end services.

While I'm still learning about node, I'm becoming very familiar with the basics. If you're new to using node and want to check if you have it on your computer in the terminal you can type:

node -v

If it is installed you should see a version number. If you don't its just a simple trip to the docs and downloading whichever version is right for your computer(windows or mac). After following the prompts run the above command in terminal to double check if node exists on your computer now. You should see a version number appear like:

v15.5.0

Once started you can test out your code skills in the REPL environment that node provides. Just type 'node' in the terminal and it will open up an environment for you to play around it. You can assign variable, practice functions, and maybe even more. Another way to practice your js chops within node is to create a .js file and practice your JS skill there. Depending if you want to check on certain outputs of a function you could run the file in your terminal as well by using

node *file_name*.js

As I stated in the beginning, very basic knowledge so far, but a week ago I didn't even know what node was. Sounds like a win to me. I'm excited to dive deeper into using node and gain an even greater understanding of it. Give it a try and as always, Happy Coding!