When working either on the frontend or the backend, you will surely want to use already available libraries and frameworks, and that begets an interesting problem: how to deal with those packages' own needs, more packages, which themselves need even more packages, and so on. In Chapter 3, Developing with Node, we'll work with Node, but we need to get ahead of ourselves, and install npm (the package manager of Node) now to be able to set up several other tools.

npm also is the name of a gigantic repository of software, at https://www.npmjs.com/, which counts has around 600,000 packages you can observe that in the following screenshot and it grows at a daily rate of more than 500 packages, according to counts such as at http://www.modulecounts.com/, a place that tracks several well-known code repositories:

It can be safely said that it's probably impossible that a modern JS application doesn't require at least one, and more likely several, packages from npm, so adding a package manager will be mandatory; let's see a couple of them.