Node.js, MongoDB and AngularJS Web Development: The Definitive Guide to Building JavaScript-Based Web Applications from Server to Frontend (Developer's Library) 1st Edition

Its a good book for beginners to start with

As far as the information goes, this book offers a pretty good explanation of Node.js and MongoDB, with a meh explanation of Angular (this can be compensated for with angular's documentation). It tends to have a higher focus on the back end technology and its implementation, and it does cover a lot of useful information that you will want to know. It could use some work on organization.The way this book is laid out is in five distinct and mostly separate parts (respectively: JavaScript Primer/Intro, Node.js, MongoDB, Angular.js, and "Features"). It tends to go into a good deal of detail on each part, sometimes beyond the scope of what you "need" to do.This is the first thing that bothered me; it doesn't do a great job at interweaving the individual components, it prefers to explain them as separate and unrelated entities. IMO, it would make more sense if they used all three frameworks together in every chapter and built on it. That is, perhaps start with a simplistic Node.js back end, a single schema in MongoDB, and a front end to view and update it with Angular. Then move on by adding more complex routing, more angular configuration, and more schemas.Another reason I don't care for the approach this book used is because I'd expect a book featuring Angular.js to be very focused on a single page application and making use of ReSTFuL interfaces and APIs. This wouldn't be too bad if it introduced Angular sooner, but it comes up on chapter 20, 399 pages into the entire book (out of a total of 608 pages)Another criticism I have is that this book tends to be far more focused on the back end technologies, often leaving the front end with sub-par explanations. For example, one chapter reviewed the use of OAuth to log in users with facebook, twitter, google or any other service provider. The Node.js and MongoDB parts were quite easy to follow. The chapter seemed to end somewhat abruptly, not implementing the Angular module to access the authentication services.TL;DR:- Node.js and MongoDB parts are fairly easy to follow and have most of the basic info you need- mostly focused on back end, sometimes with incomplete explanations of Angular.js- somewhat disorganized. Provides a lot of details which are not immediately relevant and therefore forgettable.

Love this book!

Fantastic book for learning node.js and MongoDB. Far better than anything out there currently. Also deals with latest version of Express.The problem is the section on AngularJS. This section is poorly written and very confusing to understand as a result. You are better off using Ari Lerner's book on AngularJS (search for ng-book) or the AngularJS JumpStart lectures by Dan Wahlin.Use this book only for node.js, MongoDB and Express and ditch the other chapters.

This book was not intended for people with limited programming experience. I am from a technical background and have coded before.This book is a series of tutorials. Many poorly written, and I had to read the online documentation to understand the key concepts. Several sections did not work as written. The angular section was poorly written and I skipped the section as a result. Chapter 26 does not provide the right code to connect to your database. At points, I felt this book provided negative training value and has no place on a beginners list of purchases.I would strongly warn any other beginners from purchasing this. I myself stopped after numerous code examples did not work, and there was no basis provided to help troubleshoot what was wrong. A wasted purchase and hopefully not a total waste of time reading this.

BASICS: I have read through a large swath of programming books over the years including a number of them specific to Javascript, and others covering Node.js in particular. Based on the sampling I have experienced I have seen my share of books that were awful for many reasons, and others that were well-written and stayed true to what they claimed to offer. Here, finally, is a book that actually organizes itself into sections properly and introduces each technology with an overview of the major concepts it encompasses and then dives deeper into them in subsequent chapters.THE GOOD: Perhaps most important - and something I've found problematic with many programming books in the past - is that it balances the explanation of concepts in easy to understand, plain English with supplements of code snippets that make sense and includes full WORKING examples using those code snippets. The companion code (freely available to download) is organized according to chapter and also contains actual working code.While there remains plenty of material that wasn't really covered by the book, it certainly gives the best coverage of the basics to engage the reader and push them forward with learning. As with anything, you can't expect to become an expert by reading a single book - you need to supplement what you learn here with your own practice and other sources. This will get you introduced and put you on your way to further searching and refining those areas that you feel you want to really dive in to.WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW: Prior knowledge of Javascript will come in handy but isn't necessary if you have experience with general concepts of programming (this book isn't going to teach you the fundamentals of programming, nor will it teach you best practices concerning design patterns). Instead you will jump in and get started with an overview of the 3 technologies covered by the book: Node.js (server-side JS), MongoDB (database), and AngularJS (client-side JS library); then begin downloading and installing what you need (with decent instructions for doing so).THE BAD: Not much really - the one thing I will mention is that these modules and libraries for Node.js are constantly evolving at a fast pace and so it is difficult to write a book and not have versioning updates change APIs, however the code-base tends to be verbose and degrade gracefully in most cases. Specifically there have been updates to the way Express works and its relationship with the underlying Connect module - so it may be in your best interest to either a) install the specific version of Express used by the author or b) learn how to do things with Express/Connect using the newest APIs by reading their documentation and/or StackOverflow for help. MongoDB has also undergone a major version update (now at 2.6x rather than 2.4x used by the book), however the changes aren't Earth shattering for the concepts covered by the book, and it is possible to install the earlier version if you don't want to deal with the potential need to research the newer options of some functionality. So the code examples from the book all work with the caveat that you must be using the correct versions of everything which, luckily, is very simply to do in the world of Node and NPM.FINAL NOTES: I regularly develop with Linux and have plenty of previous experience doing so. I'd also worked with Node.js and MongoDB prior to this book, so your mileage may vary, but the setups seemed to explain the processes for Windows, Mac OSx, and Linux environments well enough. If you have a computer with a decent amount of RAM I would recommend you install something like Virtualbox and setup a sandbox virtual machine running your operating system of choice as it will allow you to potentially make mistakes without risk to your main OS and generally just experiment in a safe environment for free (yes, even Microsoft has some Virtualbox images you can download free of charge with Windows 7 on them to test and develop with).