O’Reilly Reveals Preview for Its First Book on Node.js

Up and Running With Node, an as-yet-unpublished tome on Node.js, is available as an online preview for all interested parties — especially helpful and constructive commenters.
O’Reilly Media’s first “animal book” on the increasingly popular framework Node.js should be hitting store shelves sometime this summer. What you can see now is author Tom Hughes-Croucher’s text, images and code samples, all of which are currently open for comments.
As Hughes-Croucher writes in the Author’s Note for the preview, “What you’ll find within this first release is not necessarily the final work that we will publish. We hope by making this book available as it’s written we’ll get your feedback, ideas and thoughts on what I’ve already written and what else we should be covering.”
Node.js is rapidly evolving — almost too rapidly for the printed page to keep pace — so Hughes-Croucher, who is also a Node core contributor, is doing all he can to ensure the book is, at press time, current with the available versions of Node.
As O’Reilly describes it, “This book introduces you to Node, the new web development framework written in JavaScript. You’ll learn hands-on how Node makes life easier for experienced JavaScript developers: not only can you work on the front end and back end in the same language, you’ll also have more flexibility in choosing how to divide application logic between client and server.
“Node is already winning the hearts and minds of many companies, including Google and Yahoo. This book shows you why.”
Among other things, the book attempts to teach devs about Node’s approach to event-driven programming and its support for databases and data storage tools. Readers will also find best practices for the still-nascent framework and get examples of how to use the APIs.
Node has also captured the imaginations of many of the developers we talk to on a regular basis; we’re excited to see what Hughes-Croucher is bringing to the table.
The author told us via e-mail that he’ll be updating the preview every two weeks. Anyone can read and comment on the book until it’s published.
And if you already know you’re going to want a hard copy, it’s available for pre-order for $34.99.