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azat-co / expressworks

Learn Express.js from the author of one of the best books on Express.js—Pro Express.js— with this workshop that will teach you basics of Express.js.
MIT License
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STATIC - confused about instructions - where to learn more #98

Closed bessieatrazoyo closed 8 years ago

bessieatrazoyo commented 8 years ago

I am finding the ExpressWorks instructions incomprehensible. Perhaps I am missing some prerequisites. I’ve written out my questions below to show the level of ignorance I am coming to this learning session with. If you have suggestions about where to go to learn what I need before I start, please let me know.

For example, Exercise 2 of 8 (static) says:

Please don't use ANY routes like app.get. ONLY static.

I wonder:

  1. What is a route?
  2. How can I learn about app?
  3. Static? Static as opposed to dynamic. What does that mean?

Your solution must listen on the port number supplied by process.argv[2].

I wonder:

  1. What listens?
  2. Is this like the Hello World one where I used this: var app = express(); ... app.listen(process.argv[2]);

This is how you can call static middleware:

I wonder:

  1. What is static middleware?
  2. Where can I learn about it?

For this exercise expressworks will pass you the path:

app.use(express.static(process.argv[3] || path.join(__dirname, 'public')))

I wonder:

  1. Is app var app = express();?
  2. If so, what is express?
  3. Where did the path variable come from?

This what I think is supposed to happen: process.argv[3] points to an HTML file. I am supposed get this HTML file and send it back in a response. I’m supposed to wait for a request from process.argv[2], but I don’t know if I’m supposed to parse that request in any way.

TylerMoeller commented 8 years ago

The best place to start is with the command: expressworks help

This will give you a link to the API documentation and another to a book written by azat-co.

API docs: http://expressjs.com/api.html Express.js Guide: http://expressjsguide.com

The API docs should answer your questions:

Hope this helps.

bessieatrazoyo commented 8 years ago

Thank you very much the links to expressjs.com is what I was looking for. It will be a while before I can get back to it, but I'll post how it went when I do. Keep it open for now.

bessieatrazoyo commented 8 years ago

Evan Hahn's blog post: http://evanhahn.com/understanding-express/ helped me out.

azat-co commented 8 years ago

@TylerMoeller thanks ;)