As mentioned in my last post, I'll be helping teach the Learnyounode exercises from NodeSchool.io this weekend (5/23/2015).
In preparation for tomorrow's workshop, I completed the Learnyounode exercises last night. Learnyounode is a series of 13 exercises designed to teach the student about NodeJS. The exercises start very basic but quickly get fairly challenging. None of the exercises are long, but they do involve concepts, like streams, that many developers are probably not familiar with. The exercises make use of libraries where necessary but, where possible, encourage the student to do it the "hard way" before relying on libraries to make the exercises easier.
I’ve uploaded all of my answers into a repo, in case anyone would like to see them: https://github.com/gwmccull/learnyounode
I've done a number of projects in NodeJS but I was always building APIs with ExpressJS. Several of the Learnyounode exercises involved file I/O, which was new to me, and the API exercises were done using only the HTTP library.
I liked these exercises a little more than the NodeSchool Javascripting exercises. While they didn't explicitly cover the "why" of programming, once you start serving files, process performing file I/O and grabbing data from APIs, you can start to imagine how programming could be used.