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What Is Node? by Brett McLaughlin

Product Description
Node.js. It’s the latest in a long line of “Are you cool enough to use me?” programminglanguages, APIs, and toolkits. In that sense, it lands squarely in the tradition of Rails,and Ajax, and Hadoop, and even to some degree iPhone programming and HTML5.

Dig a little deeper, and you’ll hear that Node.js (or, as it’s more briefly called by many,simply “Node”) is a server-side solution for JavaScript, and in particular, for receivingand responding to HTTP requests. If that doesn’t completely boggle your mind, by thetime the conversation heats up with discussion of ports, sockets, and threads, you’lltend to glaze over. Is this really JavaScript? In fact, why in the world would anyonewant to run JavaScript outside of a browser, let alone the server?

The good news is that you’re hearing (and thinking) about the right things. Node reallyis concerned with network programming and server-side request/response processing.The bad news is that like Rails, Ajax, and Hadoop before it, there’s precious little clearinformation available. There will be, in time — as there now is for these other “cool”frameworks that have matured — but why wait for a book or tutorial when you mightbe able to use Node today, and dramatically improve the maintainability.

What Is HTML5? by Brett McLaughlin

Product Description
HTML5: Everyone’s using it, nobody knows what it is. I realize that sounds more like a line out of an existential movie — maybe Waiting for Godot or a screenplay by Sartre — than a statement about HTML5. But it’s really the truth: most of the people using HTML5 are treating it as HTML4+, or even worse, HTML4 (and some stuff they don’t use). The result? A real delay in the paradigm shift that HTML5 is almost certain to bring. It’s certainly not time to look away, because by the time you look back, you may have missed something really important: a subtle but important transition centered around HTML5.