During the instruction of Codecademy's "Learn Express" course, we see a few middleware modules that we can optionally use in our project as needed. Examples used in the course are morgan and body-parser, and one of the quizzes asked us to look up vhost. Course material even started using serve-static before we learned about middleware modules at all. These four middleware modules were among those popular enough to be adopted by the Expressjs team who now maintain them.

Since that meant I already had a browser tab open to the Express project site, I decided to poke around. Specifically, I wanted to see how their own Getting Started guide compared to the Codecademy course I just finished. My verdict: the official Express site provides a wider breadth of information but not nearly as much depth for educating a newcomer. If I hadn't taken the Codecademy course and tried to get started with this site, I would have been able to get a simple Express application up and running but I would not have understood much of what was going on. Especially if I had created an app using the boilerplate application generator. Even after the Codecademy course I don't know what most of these settings mean!

But the official site had wider breadth, as Codecademy didn't even mention the boilerplate tool. It also has many lists of pointers to resources, like the aforementioned list of popular middleware modules. Another list I expect to be useful is a sample of options for database integration. Some minimal contextual information was provided with each listed link, but it's up to us to follow those links and go from there. The only place where this site goes in depth is the Express API reference, which makes sense as the official site for Express should naturally serve as the authoritative source for such information!

I anticipate that I will use Express for at least a few learning/toy projects in the future, at which point I will need to return to this site for API reference and pointers to resources that might help me solve problems in the future. However, before I even get very far into Express, this site has already helped me solve an immediate problem: node-static is out of date.