One of the most important things that people get confused about while getting introduced to Node.js is understanding what, exactly, it is. Is it a different language altogether, is it just a framework on top of it, or is it something else? Node.js is definitely not a new language, and it is not just a framework on JavaScript. It can be considered as a runtime environment for JavaScript built on top of Google's V8 engine. So, it provides us with a context where we can write JavaScript code on any platform where Node.js can be installed. Anywhere!

Now, a bit about its history! Back in 2009, Ryan Dahl gave a presentation at JSConf that changed JavaScript forever. During his presentation, he introduced Node.js to the JavaScript community. He concluded it after a roughly 45-minute talk, receiving a standing ovation from the audience in the process. He was inspired to write Node.js after he saw a simple file upload progress bar on Flickr, the image-sharing site. Realizing that the site was going about the whole process the wrong way, he decided that there had to be a better solution.

Now let's go through the features of Node.js, which make it unique from other server-side programming languages.