Presented at MelbJS (Melbourne Javascript Meetup) on 11th Apri

1. Scripting with NodeJS
Ben Pearson - @benjaminpearson

2. Most of the time I develop with Objective C....
...quite different to the clean syntax of JavaScript

3. Scripting
• Automating tasks
• Command line utilities
• Macros
• Scraping websites
• Shell, Python, PHP, Ruby

4. NodeJS
• Built on V8 engine
• Run JavaScript outside of browser
• Fast, non-blocking / asynchronous,
lightweight
• It's JavaScript, for realz!

6. npm - Package Manager for Node
• Super easy
• Search, install and update packages
• http://npmjs.org/

8. Getting Started
• git clone https://github.com/visionmedia/n.git
• cd n
• sudo make install
• sudo n stable
Latest versions of node come with npm, if you are having issues you can try
• curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh
* note: ideally its best not to use `sudo` so cavalier, there are alternative methods, but this is simple.

9. Code Example
• Youtube
• Command line args
• process.argv
• commander.js
• Bin it

10. Code Example
• Radar / Ping
• Cron
• Growl notifications
• Daemonize

11. Code Example
• Visual Rent
• Web scraping with jQuery (sizzle selectors)
• Express
• fs
• MongoDB

12. Moaaar Modules
• npmjs.org - search modules
• Node modules wiki page

13. What would MacGyver Do?
Script with NodeJS

14. Thank you