Introduction

From the outset, Node.js was created to provide an alternative to the thread-per-request model of the first generation of HTTP servers. The event loop and the asynchronous nature of Node.js make it ideal for I/O-intensive servers that need to provide high throughput for a high number of concurrent clients. Because of that, it came armed with powerful and simple-to-use APIs to build HTTP servers out of the box.

In the previous chapter, we talked about what Node.js and NPM are and how they work. In this chapter, you will learn about the basic global objects that are available to every script in Node.js. You will learn about readable and writable streams and how you can use them to read and write to files asynchronously. You will also learn how to read and write to files using the synchronous filesystem APIs.

In the last couple of sections, you will learn how to use the HTTP module to write web servers and make HTTP requests. You will build a static and a dynamic web...