// the take
A 2015-era Chinese-language Node.js course by alsotang, structured as 19 bite-sized lessons that build a small app from scratch: basic Express, scraping, concurrency control, testing, deployment to Heroku, CI with Travis. Aimed at Chinese-speaking beginners who already know basic programming but have never shipped anything in Node.
Each lesson is scoped to one concrete skill and has a runnable example rather than slides or prose-only explanation, which is rare for free tutorials at this scale. It gets testing (mocha/should/istanbul, supertest) and CI into the curriculum early instead of treating them as an afterthought. The concurrency lessons (eventproxy, then async) walk through the actual pre-Promise pain points junior devs hit, which is useful context even if nobody should write that style today.
The README itself admits the content is frozen in 2015 callback style and never got an async/await pass, so a beginner following it today learns patterns they'll have to unlearn. Heroku's free tier is gone and Travis CI's free OSS plan is largely dead, so two of the lessons point at infrastructure that no longer works as described. Zero commits since early 2022 means none of this has been updated for current Node LTS, npm workflow, or testing tools (nobody ships istanbul or raw mocha+should as a default anymore). It's Chinese-only with no translation, so it's only a fit for a specific audience despite the star count.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →