Build a server with Express: routes, route parameters, middleware, responses, and error handling.
Node.js Basics left you with a program that ran once and stopped. A web server does not stop: it waits, and every time a request arrives it decides what to do and sends something back. Express is the library that makes describing those decisions short enough to read, and it is the one almost every Node developer meets first. This course is the mechanics. You will register routes, read what the client asked for, send answers with the right status, and put functions in front of your handlers so that logging, guarding, and parsing happen once instead of in every route. By the end you will have written middleware by hand, split a growing app into routers, and caught every failure in one place. Everything is built on the Crew API, the same team board the rest of the program uses. It starts as one route that answers with a string and finishes as an API with routers, guards, body parsing, and an error handler. The next course, Build a REST API, takes that finished API and asks a harder question: not does it work, but is it well designed.
45 Lessons • 53 Practices • 18 Quizzes • 4 Projects · ~10h Total
Not just theory. You finish this course with real work to show.
This is the same in-browser editor every lesson uses. Edit the code, hit Run.
Run code in the browser and see the result immediately. Every lesson works this way.
Stuck? Puff explains the error and nudges you forward, without giving the answer away.
Streaks, diamonds, and certificates. Your progress saves automatically, forever.
Every completed course issues a certificate with a public verification link.
Every certificate has a public verification link employers can check.
One certificate per course. Finish a program and earn its program certificate too.
LinkedIn-ready, with a PDF you can download and attach.
You have written server-side JavaScript that runs and finishes. This is the step to a program that waits and answers.
You have called a dozen APIs. This is the other end of the wire, in the language you already write.
Build a REST API assumes every idea in this course from its first item.
Express.js Basics is free to start, no credit card needed. Some later sections are part of Pro, and finishing every section, including the certificate, needs a Pro plan.
Yes. This course assumes modules, the callback shape, error-first handling, and custom Error types from item one, and spends them without re-teaching any.
Yes. Every route, handler, middleware function and error handler you write is ordinary Express that runs unchanged on a real server. The framework beneath it is a stand-in, because Express cannot be installed in a browser, and the first lesson of the course says so plainly.
How this course connects to the bigger picture, and what to explore next.
Free to start, no credit card required. Write real code from the first lesson and keep your progress forever.
Start Learning FreeNothing in a browser can hold a port open. app.listen exists and reports itself so the line is real, and the requests your API answers are dictated at the bottom of the editor instead of typed into a browser. Everything between those two stand-ins is the real thing.
This one teaches how to make Express do a thing. That one teaches which thing is the right one to do: resources, verbs, status codes, and the design decisions behind them.
The Crew API, one route at a time: lookups, a request log, a guard that refuses requests without a token, member creation from a request body, routes grouped into routers, and one error handler that catches everything.
Yes, for this course at 100 percent. It also counts towards the Full-Stack Development program certificate, which issues once every course in the program is complete.