Node’s origins – by Ryan Dahl himself!

Your first steps writing a Node program

Node is the engine that executes Javascript code. In the video above you can watch the whole story of how NodeJS got started. It’s an epic video, and author Ryan Dahl along with the fresh Node engine started a sort of big revolution in software world.

Thanks to Node, Javascript language could now be used efficiently in a stand-alone manner. Before this, JavaScript was used in web browser only – like any language, Javascript needs an execution environment.

The idea of JavaScript programs is simple:

• write the Javascript code using a text editor
• let’s assume your code is in a file called index.js
• after you are finished writing, run your code with: node index.js

Installing Node

• plenty of good tutorials in Internet
• official download site is https://nodejs.org/en/download/
• you choose the download file to suit Windows, Mac or Linux
• should take no more than 5 minutes to install

Once you have done installation, open a shell and type:

node -v

You should see Node responding with a version string, like:

v16.13.1

We’re good to go.

• create a file called index.js
• write the following lines into the file:

console.log('Hi!')

Run the program.