Setting Up Development Tools

The first section of this book (Chapters 1-3) was written to provide sufficient background knowledge so that we can code without interruption. In this chapter, we will actually start building our user directory application, called 'hobnob', by setting up our local development environment.

The aim of this chapter is to help you understand how different tools and standards in the Node.js ecosystem work together. Specifically, we'll cover the following:

• What is Node.js?
• Different formats/standards for JavaScript modules
• Managing modules with npm and yarn
• Transpiling code with Babel
• Watching for changes with nodemon
• Linting our code with ESLint