Two very known software architects and engineers recently published another edition of their Node.js book and decided to use Rebrandly branded links in the print edition of the book. Over 250 links have been used in the book and we are curious to understand their use case.
Q: Hi Luciano, hi Mario, tell us a bit about your careers.
A: Mario Casciaro (https://mario.fyi): I am a software engineer and entrepreneur with several years of experience, including working for IBM. I am currently splitting my time between Var7 Technologies (my own software company) and D4H Technologies where I work as Lead Engineer to create software for emergency response teams. Luciano Mammino (https://loige.co): I wrote my first line of code at the age of 12 on his father's old i386. Since then, I have never stopped coding. I am currently working at FabFitFun as Principal Software Engineer where I am building applications that are used by millions of users every day.
Q: What is your new book about?
A: Node.js Design Patterns, is aimed at helping software engineers to become proficient with Node.js and learn everything that is needed to run production-grade Node.js applications. With this perspective in mind, the book shows how to implement a number of best practices and design patterns to help create efficient and robust Node.js applications.
In the first part of the book, we explore the basics of Node.js, analyzing its asynchronous event-driven architecture and its fundamental design patterns. We then show you how to build asynchronous control flow patterns with callbacks, promises, and async/await. Next, we dive into Node.js streams, revealing their power and showing how to use them at best. At the core part of the book we present an analysis of different creational, structural, and behavioral design patterns and we illustrate how to implement them in such a way to take full advantage of the capabilities of JavaScript and Node.js. Lastly, the book dives into more advanced topics such as Universal JavaScript, scalability and messaging patterns to help you build enterprise-grade distributed applications and microservices.
Throughout the book, you'll see Node.js in action with the help of several real-life examples leveraging technologies such as LevelDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, and many others. They will be used to demonstrate a pattern or technique, but they will also give you a great introduction to the Node.js ecosystem and its set of solutions.
Q: This book is the third edition. What’s new and why should I read it if I already read one of the previous editions?
A: This new edition has been almost a year in the making and it was almost entirely rewritten to provide new content and modernize the existing one. It was a big effort, but we believe it was absolutely worth it! As you know, the Node.js ecosystem evolves very fast and since the second edition (published in 2016) many things have changed. For example, Node.js now has great support for async/await, a new JavaScript syntax that can be used to greatly simplify dealing with asynchronous code. We took great care to update all the examples in the book to leverage async/await and we took the chance to also introduce some new patterns that are specific to this feature. Similar work was done for EcmaScript modules (ESM), all the examples have been migrated to the new module system to help developers embrace modern features as much as possible as they learn by reading the various chapters of the book. Finally, we took very seriously all the feedback we received from our readers over the years and we tried to incorporate a number of brilliant corrections and suggestions. Just to give you one example, every chapter now comes with a series of challenging exercises to practice the topics of the chapter. This is something that many of our readers have been asking for and we look forward to seeing what kind of solutions they will come up with while solving these exercises.
Q: How many links did you use in the book?
A: Our book includes over 250 links in about 600 pages. We registered the domain nodejsdp.link in our Rebrandly dashboard first. Then we created memorable and pronounceable branded links easy to transcribe in your browser and to share with your relevant contacts.
Q: Why are you using branded links in a physical, printed book?
A: There is more than one reason:
- We needed a mechanism to link to external resources (and occasionally code examples in the repository) as the reader goes through the topics of the book.
- Branded links are short and easy to copy, even manually from the print edition of the book, so it's a great way to create a link from a physical media to a web page.
- We needed the possibility to change the link targets. We are linking external resources (e.g. documentation pages for third-party libraries), if those links break over time we need a convenient way to retarget the links to a new URL. Consider that the print edition of the book can't be updated, so it's extremely convenient to be able to just retarget the short URLs.
- Rebrandly also allows us to monitor what links are clicked the most and therefore we can understand which topics are more interesting to our readers
- We can also find out the location of the clicks, which might give us other useful indications of what content is more interesting per country
Q: Where can someone buy the book?
A: Via Amazon: https://Nodejsdp.link/BUY
Interested in enhancing your printed book with Branded Links? Read also:
Why you should use branded links on a printed book
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