Third-party modules

You now know two out of the three ways to use require(), and in this section, we'll explore the last way, which is to require a package you've installed from npm. As I mentioned in the first chapter, npm is a big part of what makes Node so fantastic. There is a huge community of developers that have created thousands of packages that already solve some of the most common problems in Node applications. We will be taking advantage of quite a few packages throughout the book.

Creating projects using npm modules

Now, in the npm packages, there's nothing magical, it's regular Node code that aims to solve a specific problem. The reason you'd want to use it is so you don't have to spend all your time writing these utility functions that already exist; not only do they exist, they've been tested, they've been proven to work, and others have used them and documented them.

Now, with all that said, how do we get started? Well, to get started, we actually have to run a command from...