Before we dig in and start building a full-blown web application using Node and MongoDB, it's important that we review some of the basics. This chapter will give you a crash course on syntax and important topics. It is broken down into two parts, where the first half focuses on JavaScript or Node, and the second half covers MongoDB. You will gain insight into some of the more common and powerful tools available to you, and a lot of sample code will be reviewed to get you up to speed.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

• Fundamentals of the JavaScript language
• The basics of Node.js
• Node's package manager, npm
• The basics of MongoDB

By the end of this chapter, you should have a solid understanding of the syntax and how to use both Node and MongoDB. There's a lot to cover, so let's get started.