Original subtitles

Now before we finally dive into the javascript refresher or optionally in case you skip that, into the

nodejs basics,

let me dive into two different ways of executing your node code. One way of executing it which I briefly

mentioned earlier in this module is the repl. Repl stands for read, reading user input, eval, evaluating

user input, print, outputting a result and l, loop for returning and waiting for new input and the repl

is what you use

if you just type node into your terminal. Here I am in the terminal or on Windows this would be your command

prompt and there if you just type node with node installed, you are now in the repl which you can identify

by the fact that you now don't have that full path of your computer name at the beginning but just that

greater than sign

and there you can execute node commands like console log, two plus two or also writing, interacting with

files.

You can import the file system there just as we did it previously in our file and then we can use that

to write a file synchronously and so on,

so that will all work here

and this is of course an environment where we don't store our code in files

but we write our node application with every line.

The lines don't work independent from each other,

so I can now use the file system package for example

now that I imported it one line earlier but once I quit out of this process with control c, I'm done.

This is not saved anywhere,

this is not a file I can execute again and this therefore is a great playground.

The alternative to running codes is that you execute files as we did it before and as we will basically

do it for the rest of the course,

this is the alternative to using the repl. When you execute files,

the advantage of course is and that is why we use it for real apps, that we write our code in advance

and we can always execute it and when we build a real app, we want to save our code of course in files

which we can then deploy in the end which we could share with other developers and where we can also pause

our work and pick up later

and where we never lose the code we write. But the repl is a great playground because we can use that to run some

commands, to try out certain things because we execute code as we write it and therefore these are the

two ways of running your node code,

obviously we'll go with the store code in files approach in this course

but whenever I say repl, I'm referring to this direct input way which I can recommend for trying out

some features but not for writing real applications,

that is not what you would do.

I just wanted to get these two ways out of the way,

we'll focus on the left one here and with that, let's dive into writing some code with the next modules.