Want to build efficient and scalable Node.js applications? Learn how to make JavaScript work for you, not against you.

Node.js went from an out-of-the-box idea to a mainstay in record time. Today, it’s a de facto standard for creating web applications, systems software, and more. Server-side Node frameworks like Express, build-chain tools like Webpack, and a host of utilities for every need make Node a hugely popular way to leverage the power and expressiveness of JavaScript on the back end. Although Node now has competition from Deno and Bun, it remains the flagship JavaScript platform on the server.

Node owes much to JavaScript for its enormous popularity. JavaScript is a multiparadigm language that supports many different styles of programming, including functional programming, reactive programming, and object-oriented programming. It allows the developer to be flexible and take advantage of the various programming styles.But JavaScript can be a double-edged sword. The multiparadigm nature of JavaScript means that nearly everything is mutable. Thus, you can’t brush aside the probability of object and scope mutation when writing Node.js code. Because JavaScript lacks tail-call optimization (which allows recursive functions to reuse stack frames for recursive calls), it’s dangerous to use recursion for large iterations. In addition to pitfalls like these, Node is single-threaded, so it’s imperative for developers to write asynchronous code. Node also suffers from facepalms common to all languages, like swallowing errors.