Explain like I only speak in plain English

NodeJs is a system that runs JavaScript programs for back-end server applications. This enables web engineers to use one programming language for writing front-end and back-end projects.

JavaScript, originally a browser only programming language, has been made executable on servers with NodeJs. Before NodeJs, engineers mainly wrote back-end applications in Ruby, PHP, Java, Python, .Net, etc.

Explain like I'm a total nerd

NodeJs is a runtime environment that can execute JavaScript server side, i.e. not needing a browser. You can write any JavaScript program and use NodeJs to execute it. Since it isn’t running in a browser, it doesn’t have access to the browser specific objects such as window, document, etc.

Being a server side runtime environment, NodeJs comes with built in modules, namely ‘http’, ‘https’ module, that deal with data transfers. You can write a very basic Node server with just a few lines of code. See example. To start a server, just use Node to execute the file containing the server code in terminal `node server.js`.

NodeJs is based on the V8 engine built by Google for the Chrome browser to translate JavaScript code into machine code. This is what enables NodeJs to run JavaScript code server side.

Explain like I like videos

The following video demonstrates how to create a text file, edit it, and delete it using the command line interface.

Explain like I already know it

You can install and use third party NodeJs libraries in your projects to speed up development time. This is however a double edged sword as there are just too many choices for NodeJs. For web frameworks alone, there exists more than 10 different choices.

ExpressJs is one of the more popular and mature web framework. It has been the go to choice for building server applications in NodeJs. The team behind ExpressJs also created Koa, which is a more minimalistic approach to writing APIs. Koa has risen in popularity dramatically in 2017 and is the hottest choice in 2018.

Command Line Interface (CLI)

Command line interface (CLI) is a text based input system for programmers to instruct a computer. Programmers need to input lines of precise instructions the computer understands for it to work. It is the preferred way for programmers to interact with computers as it is very fast.

NPM

NPM, short for Node Package Manager, is a package manager for JavaScript libraries. NPM is used to deal with installation, removal, updates of JavaScript packages in both front-end and back-end projects.

JavaScript

JavaScript can turn static websites into dynamic websites. JavaScript gives possibility to interactive features such as live chat, infinite feed loading, map navigation, animation and more. If HTML is the skeleton, CSS is the skin/fat/hair, JavaScript would be the muscles.