After watching and reviewing Anthony Alicea's timeless masterclass on JavaScript, I thought I should see what other courses he offered. So I picked up Learn and Understand NodeJS.

I'm not a Node developer per se, but as a JavaScript developer who relies heavily on NPM, I do use it daily in a sense. I had always wanted to learn more Node and had built simple servers with Express. I also use Node templates in AWS Lambda, so I knew I'd find plenty of applications for adding this new framework to my arsenal.

As with the previous course, things started clicking right away. I learned that Node was built on the V8 engine that powers Chrome. I had heard this before, but Anthony reveals the concepts very well by walking through the C++ source code and explaining how the modules expose APIs to Node.

Next he provided a refresher on server theory and we built our own modules. I recognized many of the patterns we used from other Node apps and templates I've seen. He explained the difference between ES6 modules and Node modules as well as ES6 export and Node module.export.

The course continues this way teaching you clearly and methodically all of the major concepts in Node:

• Events and Event Emitters
• The Event Loop
• Async Code
• Streams & Files
• Buffers and Pipes
• Routing
• Express
• Databases & JSON

Anthony Alicea is the most detail-oriented instructor that I've found. Unfortunately, the only course by him that I haven't picked up yet is on AngularJS from 2015 (before modern Angular 2+). I'll probably watch the Node and JS courses again just to reinforce the concepts and let it sink in better. His thought-process is truly unique and I strongly recommend this course for anyone wanting to learn and understand Node.