Message for beginners

8 June 2013

For beginners

If you are beginner in fields of Software development, this article is for you.

IDE

I guess you came here, because you have already heard about Node.js, then was looking for good tools.

Eclipse is IDE with over 10 years history, then became platform for a lot of software tools, see Wikipedia.

Learning a bit of Eclipse for developing Node.js will help you even if you don’t plan to look at Java.

Eclipse is IDE, that has Editor, Debugger, several Views of the project data, that are integrated as one application. In Eclipse one set of UI layouts is called Perspective.

Node.js vs Java

Node.js is new, relatively simple, 5MB download size.

Whereas JDK (Java Development Kit) is currently 88MB, has a lot of use cases, languages. Some features are new, some are outdated.

Java is mostly used for Enterprise (big companies) software.
Node.js is currently good for small and middle projects. It is already taking some share of all other languages, for example Python, because it is easier to start (Every developers know a bit of JavaScript)

JavaScript

JavaScript on Mozilla Developer Network

Starting with Node.js

[How do I get started with Node.js? (wiki on Stackoverflow)] (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2353818/how-do-i-get-started-with-node-js)

There are a lot of materials currently.

My personal recommendation is:

• install SDK (Node.js)
• get good tools (Nodeclipse)
• read documentation (http://nodejs.org/api/)
• explorer libraries (https://npmjs.org/)
• learn from good open source project( which one? Just what you find and interesting for you, without bugs and well documented, active)

Those principles would apply when studying any programming languages or platform.

Good luck!

Paul Verest