Module basics

In this section, you will finally learn some Node.js code, and we'll kick things off by talking about modules inside Node. Modules are units of functionality, so imagine I create a few functions that do something similar, such as a few functions that help with math problems, for example, add, subtract, and divide. I could bundle those up as a module, call it Andrew-math, and other people could take advantage of it.

Now, we'll not be looking at how to make our own module; in fact, we will be looking at how we can use modules, and that will be done using a function in Node, called require(). The require() function will let us do three things:

• First, it'll let us load in modules that come bundled with Node.js. These include the HTTP module, which lets us make a web server, and the fs module, which lets us access the filesystem for our machine.

Note

We will also be using require() in later sections to load in third-party libraries, such as Express and Sequelize, which will let us write...