The Node.

js Developer Roadmap for 2021

Node.js has been one of the biggest game-changer since its release, bigger companies like
Uber, Medium, PayPal & Walmart switched their tech stack to Node.js. You can make really
powerful applications with Node.js such as real-time tracking apps, video and text chat
engines, social media apps, etc. And learning Node.js is becoming one of the hottest skills
for developers, the roadmap that I have prepared is based on how I learned it with my own
experience and tips. Before deep-diving into this Node.js roadmap make sure that you have
a clear & concise goal of what you want to build with Node.js otherwise you will give up in
between the learning path just like I did. Keeping a goal will help you focus on learning the
essential skills on the top, instead of figuring out whether you need to learn them or not.
Prerequisites

1 .JavaScript
If you are a frontend developer looking to master some backend skills then you don't have to
spend a huge amount of time learning JavaScript before getting started with building Node.js
applications. But in case if you are a complete beginner who’s looking to master Node.js in
the minimum possible time then you must learn the following concepts before you deep dive
into the Node.js environment.
Arrow Functions
Types
Expressions
Functions
Lexical Structures
this
Loops and Scope
Arrays
Template Literals
Strict Mode
ES6/ES7
In Node.js you will be handling a lot of asynchronous programming and for that, the following
concepts are recommended to learn.
Timers
Promises
Closures
The Event Loop
Async programming and callbacks
2. NPM
Node Package Manager is the world’s largest Software Registry with over 800,000 code
packages. Using NPM the right way can help a lot as managing packages becomes pretty
handy with NPM while we develop applications that require a number of dependencies.
NPM consists of three distinct components:
The Command Line Interface (CLI): It runs in the machine’s terminal environment and how
most of the developer interact with NPM
The Registry: A large public database of JavaScript software and the meta-information.
The Website: You can discover new packages, and manage other aspects of your npm
experience.
NPM is used for managing multiple versions of code and code dependencies, run packages
without downloading them (using npx), and many more.
3. Node.js Basics
Event Emitters: They are objects in Node.js that trigger events by sending a message to
signal that an action was completed. We can also write our own code that listens to events
from an event emitter. For example, if you have done some frontend work, then you probably
know how much interaction we need to handle in our applications, such as mouse clicks,
keyboard button presses, and other mouse movements. Similarly, on the backend
environment in Node.js, we can build a similar system using the events module, which offers
EventEmitter class which we use to handle our events.
Callbacks: These are functions called when a task is completed, which prevents any kind of
blocking while allowing the rest of the code to run in the meantime. As we have to work with
a lot of asynchronous tasks in Node.js, we need them everywhere for making seamless and
faster applications. For example,

Buffers: A class called Buffer in Node.js is designed to handle raw binary data. They
correspond to some raw memory allocated outside V8. Buffers are an array of integers that
can’t be resized having a whole bunch of methods specifically for binary data. For example,
the integers in buffer represent a byte with limited values from 0 to 255 inclusive, if you
console.log() to print a Buffer instance, a chain of values in hexadecimal will be received.
Module System: As a part of the Node.js ecosystem you will be using the Module for
implementing complex functionality by just using the Modules provided by Node.js, these are
JavaScript files that contain all the organized and complex features that anyone can reuse
through the Node.js application.
Development Skills
Version Control Systems (Git, GitHub): You don’t want to be in a situation where you mess
up something in your code while having no idea how to revert it. Using VCS like Git you can
manage large scale projects & if you are already pretty familiar with using VCS then make
sure that you have strong fundamental of Version Control Systems.
HTTP/HTTPS protocols: A fundamental knowledge of how the data is transferred using the
transfer protocols will make you a better Node.js developer, a good understanding of how
HTTP and HTTPS work is something every backend developer should understand well
enough. HTTPS uses an encryption protocol known as Transport Layer Security (TLS)to
encrypt communications. There is a lot to learn in the backend environment and it might get
a little foggy for you if you had no idea how the web works, there are 4 request methods
responsible for any basic communication on the web:
GET: Used to retrieve a representation of a resource
POST: Used to create new resources
PUT: Used to update capabilities
PATCH: Used to modify capabilities
DELETE: Used to delete a resource identified by a URL
OPTIONS: Request permitted communication option for a given URL or server
Web Frameworks
Note: All these web-frameworks are good to know, if you are building a personal project with
Node.js then sticking with a single framework is recommeded, otherwise the learing path is
quiet wide to cover.
Express.js: Provides a very minimal interface and tools that are required to build our
application, quite flexible to use, and comes with numerous modules available on npm which
can be plugged directly into Express.
Meteor.js: A great go-to framework for making JavaScript applications, comes with built-in
MongoDB handlers with support for GraphQL. When you run the “meteor create myapp” and
run it, an HTML/JavaScript web page is provided with a MongoDB backend. You can use
Meteor.js as an effective alternative in your list of frameworks that helps you cut the
development time with ease of maintenance. Otherwise, I will recommend sticking with
Express if you are building a simple web app.
Sails.js: An MVC framework allows you to quickly build REST APIs, single-page apps, and
real-time apps. If you are looking to master some serious skills then Sails.js is highly
recommended as you get many benefits with it, such as real-time support with WebSockets
and it uses the “convention over configuration” approach.
Koa.js: If you are looking to build robust applications that are future proof and easy to
maintain then Koa.js is a good choice. A Koa application is an object containing an array of
some middleware functions that are later executed in a manner of stacks.
Nest.js: Inspired by Angular and built with TypeScript, uses Express.js under the hood which
makes it compatible with most of Express middleware. You can build an efficient and
scalable application with Nest.js as it provides a great modular structure for organizing code
into separate modules.
Database Management
While learning Node.js you will be working with a lot of backed stuff & if you are a beginner
you should stick to MySQL or SQL at the start. As you will get clear and concise clarification
of how we design backend systems, going beyond SQL or MySQL is case dependent as you
work with new types of projects there are chances that you will need to learn other backend
stuff.
Note: Most of the time we work with Relational Databases. For example, we model data like
products, categories, tags, etc using tables. And a table contains columns and row as similar
we have in a spreadsheet.
SQL Server: A relational database management system developed by Microsoft, it supports
ANSI SQL (a standard SQL language). However, SQL comes with its own implementations.
MySQL: Another great database management system that allows you to mage relational
databases. Open-source backend software developed by Oracle, also with MySQL we get
the flexibility of choices as we can change the source code according to the needs. MySQL
is a pretty easy alternative as compared to Oracle Database & Microsoft SQL server.
PostgreSQL: Developed by a worldwide team of developers as it is open source. It runs on
all major operating systems including Linux, UNIX & Windows. PostgreSQL supports a large
part of the SQL standard while offering some great features such as Complex SQL queries,
Foreign Keys, Trigger, Transactions, Multiversion concurrency control (MVCC), Streatimg
Repllicartons, etc.
MariaDB: An improved version of MySQL that comes which various inbuilt powerful features,
security, and performance improvements that you will not find in MySQL. There are several
reasons why you should opt for MariaDB instead of MySQL for large-scale applications. For
example, MariaDB has a larger connection pool supporting up to 200,000+ connections
whereas MySQL has a smaller connection pool. In short, MariaDB is faster than MySQL.
Cloud Database Services
Azure CosmosDB: A database service that is globally distributed, you can manage your data
remotely, using cloud databases gave you many advantages as scaling and managing big
applications becomes a bit easy with the tool that you can use to scale and distribute, all
provided by Microsoft Azure. Also, it supports multiple data models using one backend,
which means it can be used for the document, key-value, relational & graph models. As it
doesn’t rely on any schemas you can call it a NoSQL database, but it does support query
language with ACID transaction support.
Amazon DynamoDB: As far as my knowledge Amazon DynamoDB is a great alternative if
you already have some experience with SQL, it is a fully managed NoSQL database service
providing faster and predictable performance with awesome scalability. You can create
databases tables that can store and retrieve any amount of data and serve any level of
request traffic
2. NoSQL Databases
MongoDB: A document-oriented NoSQL database specifically used for high volume data
storage, as we have tables and rows in other relational databases, MongoDB uses
collections and documents. A document consists of key-value pairs that are just basic unit of
data in MongoDB & collection contains sets of documents and function which is the
equivalent of relational databases tables
Redis: Using Redis we can work with databases, caching, and message broking. It uses
data structures like strings, hashes, lists, sets, bitmaps, hyperloglogs & geospatial indexes to
store data in the form of key-value pairs. If you are confused about where we use Redix,
here is an example of that.
Let’s say in our application we have to deal with users who are authorized to take different
actions within the application, each time we authenticate a user we have to derive their
authorization for controlling acces in the applicaation.There is nothing buggy about this
approach as we have good standards like JOSE while keeping our key material safe, but if
our application has more than a couple of authorisations, the same becomes very hard to
scale. And instead of sendind the list of authorization to the user, we can store the user’s
authorization in some form of database and provide the user a key-value (known as a token)
which they have to send us for authorization.
Apache Cassandra
A highly scalable with high-performance and distributed database designed to handle a large
amount of data across many servers, with no single point of failure. Created at Facebook it
differs from other relational database management systems. The distributed design is based
on Amazon’s DynamoDB and the data model on Google’s BigTable.
LiteDB
A very lightweight & fast .NET NoSQL embedded database,with serverless document store.
You can use LiteDB in small Desktop applications and small web applications that use one
database per account store for per user.
3. Search Engines
Note: If you are thinking why do we need a search engine, then here is an example, we use
Google as a search engine, but that’s itself a whole web based application. Solr and
ElasticSearch are backend frameworks and if any type of data set is provided it creates an
index on top of that while making that data available for search on a server. You can
maintain a website with million of users with Solr as the search engine.
ElasticSearch
A search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene and developed in Java. Using
ElasticSearch you can store, and analyze huge volumes of data in real-time. As it searches
the index instead of searching the text, great search performance is also achieved in
ElasticSearch. At its core, it uses structure-based documents instead of tables and schemas
that come with extensive REST APIs for storing and searching data. You can think of
ElasticSearch as a server that processes JSON requests and giving you back JSON data.
Solr
It provides pretty advanced real-time searching capabilities such as field search, boolean
queries, phase queries, fuzzy queries, spell check, auto-complete, and many more.
Caching
Caching is simply the process of storing copies of files in cache memory so that they are
accessible for faster network responses by reducing network calls.
Memory Cache
This technique is also commonly called caching as most of the time, the caching is
associated with the memory in servers. In this technique, a portion of the server’s memory is
used as a cache where we store all the data that is required to reduce network calls in our
applications. In Node.js we have node-cache and memory-cache as some great libraries to
handle memory cache in a Node server.
Distributed Cache
In this caching technique we combine the memory of multiple networks into a single memory
data store which we later use as the final data cache to prove fast access to the data. This
technique is especially used in a high volume of data and a huge number of network calls at
the same time allows incremental expansion and scaling by adding more server memory to
the cluster. Redis is one of the most known things when it comes to Distributed caching, but
you can go beyond that by learning Memcached.

Distributed Caching
Template Engines
Using template engines we can use static template files in our application, while at the
runtime this template engine replaces the variables in a template file with actual values and
then transforms the template into an HTML file sent to the client. Listed below are some of
the popular template engines.
Mustache.js
Handlebars
EJS
Real-Time Communication
Socket.io genshin impact
There is a lot when it comes to understanding real-time communication in Socket.IO if you
are just getting started as a backend developer, the main logic behind real-time
communication stands between the client and the server. It allows the flow of bi-directional
data between the client & server, you can think of bi-directional data flow as the synchronous
flow of data between two terminals to achieve the real-time communication behavior, these
types of behavior are enabled when the client has Socket.IO in the browser along with the
server integrated with Socket.IO package. And the data can be sent in the form of JSON
requests.

Socket.IO Downloads
API Clients
REST
Before REST, APIs were developed around a remote procedure call (RPC) and the APIs
looked like some locally executed code. Many technologies tried to solve this problem using
RPC-like stacks to hide the root problem and after that REST was introduced to build
web-based APIs in a better way.
In REST the architecture is styled with simple HTTP calls to communicate instead of
complex options like COBRA, COM+, RPC. In REST the calls are messages based and rely
on the HTTP standards to describe these messages. In the Node.js ecosystem, you can go
for the node-rest-client and Axios, both serve pretty good service for faster web applications.
GraphQL
A great alternative to REST, GraphQL uses the APIs that prioritize giving clients exactly the
data they request. A flexible and developer-friendly alternative, as you can deploy it even in
an IDE known as GraphiQL. You also get the advantages to add or deprecate fields without
impacting existing queries and build APIs with whatever method is preferred.
Testing
Unit Testing Frameworks
In Unit Testing, we test individual units/components in isolation where a unit can be the
smallest testable part of code in an application. In Node.js one of the best Unit Testing
frameworks are listed below:
Jest: A very popular testing framework known for its simplicity and developed by Facebook.
Among all the testing frameworks Jest has the best documentation with parallel testing
support, which means that you can run each test in their own process to maximize
performance.
Mocha: It serves the old standards of Unit Testing frameworks for Node applications and
supports async operations like callbacks, promises with highly extensible and customizable
assertions.
Chai: It can be used alongside Mocha and can be used as a TDD/BDD assertion library for
Node.js that can be paired with any testing framework based on JavaScript.
Mocking
In Unit Testing, the test should be small and lightweight to perform, but there are objects
under test that have dependencies on other objects.
For example, the objects that need to communicate with a server or talk to a web-service,
due to that we lose the ability to run tests in a fast and lightweight manner, and that’s where
Mocking comes into action. In Mocking, we don’t need any kind of actual database or any
type of connections to run our test, it just returns the object with the expected results. So
there are just simple objects that simulate the actual results so that we can run tests faster
without any limitations.
I have listed some great posts to understand how you can use Sinon and Jasmine to
perform mocking.
Sinon
Jasmine
Some Good To Know Libraries For Node.js
Async.js
PM2
Commander.js
Nodemailer