Get confident with Express

We've now covered a range of web server concepts, including:

• The terminal
• Routes
• Adding real data to views
• Serving static files like CSS
• Templating with nunjucks

The next step is to adapt the Express app we've built to the prototypes from earlier modules.

Before that, make sure you feel confident with the topics we've covered.

Tutorials and courses

Unless you're already confident with Express, complete Codecademy's Express course.

You may also want to look at these tutorials:

• Mozilla Express tutorial
• Net Ninja Youtube Node.js and Express tutorial series

Most tutorials will teach things that we haven't covered here, and may miss things that we have covered.

That's okay—there are many ways to work with frameworks like Express, and all of them are valid.

Example app

We've created an example app, built using the same techniques covered in this course.

The example app has three views:

• A list of books
• A detailed view of a single book
• A form to add new books

First, use the app and understand how it works.

Then, explore the code and relate it to what we've covered and your own app.

The example app uses concepts that we haven't yet introduced, like databases and integration with an API. Don't worry about these for now.

GOV.UK prototyping kit

The technologies we've used here, including Node.js, Express and nunjucks, are shared with the GOV.UK prototyping kit.

Completing the basic tutorials for the prototyping kit can help you become more confident using these technologies.

Documentation

You may find the Express and nunjucks documentation useful.

These docs cover a lot of advanced concepts that aren't relevant to the app we're building. Don't feel like you have to read through irrelevant material.