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Welcome to the node-express-guidebook wiki!

This wiki is intended to share mentor guides for the Node/Express class mentors and assignment reviewers. If anyone needs/wants a brush up you can find a cheat sheet here

Each Wiki Page on this repository will cover each lesson for the class. Please feel free to use the Issues tab of this repository to report any problems you find, or suggestions you have. If you need/want a more user-friendly way of sharing feedback, please use the Curriculum Feedback form shared in your class' volunteers Slack channel.

Thank you for sharing your time with our organization and, more importantly, our students!

Onboarding for new mentors

Check out our onboarding resources on the Getting Started page!

Overview

This wiki/repository is intended to provide ideas on how to prepare for mentor sessions for the Node/Express course. There are also resources helpful for reviewers. The first 10 lessons of the course are based on a freecodecamp.org video, which has an accompanying github repository. Each student forks a copy of the repository and implements a series of programs similar to the work that the instructor does in the video. For each of the projects in the video, answers are provided as part of the repository, but in a different directory from the student's work. We even tell the students about this, so that, while they are supposed to try to do their own work, they can refer to the answers if they get stuck. For lessons 1-4, the student exercises differ from the video, so that the students can be creative, but for lessons 5-8, the student is asked to match what the instructor does.

Now, the advantage of this setup to mentors is that you don't have to watch the video to familiarize yourself with the content for the week. You can instead review the answers. You should probably clone the base repository so that it is handy. If you can explain what the code does and why it is coded that way, you are ready to answer any questions the students may have. There are a few additional programming tasks added, but you will find them pretty easy if you review them ahead of time. For the Express lessons, you should bring up the Express server for the lesson so that you can demonstrate it, using the instructor's final directory for the project. This will require that you create a MongoDB account and a .env file with your MONGO_URI.

Starting with lesson 9, the students are asked to deviate in an important way from what the instructor shows. This is so that as they do the assignments, they are also working on their final project. The deviation is that each student is asked to come up with their own data model, the information they will be managing in their Mongo database.

Lessons 11, 12, 13, and 14 are added to cover topics not covered by the video. In lesson 11, the students build a front end, which is just HTML and browser side JavaScript. In lessons 12-14, they do server side rendering with the EJS template language and authentication with Passport. The instructions for these lessons are complete, but as the students will have created their own data models, the work is not just copy/paste. Some parts of the lesson are left for the student to solve.

For all the lessons except those covered by the initial repository, I have created sample answers, and links to those sample answer repositories are in each of the lesson wiki pages.