Node.js Professional Handbook : A Practical Guide to Structuring

Are you a JavaScript developer who’s dabbled in Node.js—but feel like you’re still stuck in the world of tutorials and boilerplate apps? Do you ever wonder: “How do the pros really structure their Node.js applications?” Or maybe you're already working on a large project and silently screaming, “Is this codebase even scalable?” If you've been there, you're not alone—and this book was written exactly for you.
Why do so many Node.js applications start fast but fall apart at scale? Why do teams often spend more time fighting bugs and debugging spaghetti code than actually building features? The answer lies not in more features, but in better foundations. The Node.js Professional Handbook tackles those exact concerns—architecture, testing, and scaling—with practical, real-world solutions that are rarely covered in the average tutorial.
Ask yourself:

• How confident are you that your current folder structure will support growth six months from now?
• Do you have a testing strategy that actually helps you catch bugs before your users do?
• Are you using async/await correctly, or are you secretly nesting promises like it’s 2014?
• Is your team repeating logic across modules, or have you mastered reusable patterns?

Jarrett O. Thorneby takes you deep into the trenches of modern backend development with Node.js. This isn’t just about making things “work”—it’s about building Node apps that last. You’ll explore how professionals think about modules, dependency injection, service layers, error handling, performance tuning, and more.
This book doesn’t spoon-feed you with half-baked examples. It walks you through battle-tested techniques used by engineers building scalable platforms and production-grade APIs. Think of it as sitting beside a seasoned architect who’s pointing at your codebase and saying: “You could clean this up, here’s how.”
Still relying on Express alone without considering better abstractions or layering? Are you writing tests… or just hoping your code doesn’t break in production? Do you have logging that tells you why something failed—not just that it did?
You’ll learn:

• How to craft a clean, extensible application architecture from day one
• Strategies to manage environment configuration like a pro
• How to write fast, readable, and trustworthy unit and integration tests
• Patterns for horizontal scaling, clustering, and managing distributed workloads
• Techniques for breaking up a monolith the right way
• Real-world examples of middleware, controllers, services, repositories—and when to use (or skip) each

By the time you close this book, you won’t just understand Node.js—you’ll understand how to use it professionally. You'll finally have a mental model that scales with your projects. And yes, you’ll finally be that developer who knows what they’re doing when the codebase hits 100K+ lines and multiple contributors.