NodeSchool

NodeSchool is both a series of face-to-face workshops in cities around the world and a set of interactive, open source programming exercises you can do at your own leisure. I haven’t attended the face-to-face workshops; they are typically free or low-cost, and the same exercises are used as part of the curriculum.

I’ve used several of the interactive workshops. They’re contributed by many folks from all over the world, and the pedagogical quality and attention to detail varies. Most of them use the workshopper framework. You work in your terminal, select an exercise from the menu, and then follow the instructions. Depending on the workshop, the scripts may do some things for you, like preparing a structure of files and working directories suitable for a given exercise. Occasionally you might run into a tutorial that’s out of date or simply doesn’t work.

These workshops may be of interest even if you don’t end up using Node.js: beyond Node, there are interactive workshops about other web technologies like React, WebGL, web audio and LESS, as well as NoSQL databases like MongoDB and CouchDB.

In many ways, NodeSchool represents the web at its best – a global community motivated by the joy of learning and sharing.