Learn Natural, Npm and Particle

You can’t be everywhere at once. Neither can node packages. But with a utility called npx — included in npm v5.2 and later — you can interact and run with node modules even if they’re not downloaded locally. The same is true for gists and remote branches of GitHub. As long as npm installed, your work can be wherever you are.

This course from Elijah Manor unlocks the power of the npx utility. Over 17 minutes, we will examine the npx package runner and look through various scenarios where the tool is helpful when running node packages from the command line. You’ll learn to use npm to:

- test out various versions of a package
- run packages without globally installing
- run code directly from GitHub
- make working with packages much easier

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

Execute npm Package Binaries with the npx Package Runner

npm is like a giant library of code building blocks. There are tons of these “blocks”, aka “packages” that we can compose together to build cool things. We can use packages by other developers, but we can also write and publish our own. 

In this course we will learn how to create, publish, and update our own packages. We will create a JavaScript utility module to filter out sensitive words from a string, including tests and development file watching. We will then cover publishing and updating our package. This same approach can be used to create and publish other types of packages too like components (React, Angular, Web Components etc.) and command line interfaces.

Publish JavaScript packages on npm

In this course we will introduce the topic of using npm scripts as a build tool. We will start simple and then continue to build a small website as we introduce new topics. By the end of the course, you'll know how to get started and what tools and techniques are needed for you to create your own set of build scripts.

How to Use npm Scripts as Your Build Tool

In this course we’ll work through Natural’s API for natural language processing in JavaScript. We’ll look at how to process text: learning how to break up language strings, find the word roots, work with inflectors, find sequences of words, and tag parts of speech. We’ll learn how to find important stats about a body of text: how to compare strings, how to classify text with machine learning, how to use the tf-idf tool to find relevant words. We’ll look at some of the extra tools Natural gives us, including the dictionary/thesaurus of WordNet, a phonetics comparer that lets us see if two words sound the same, and a spellcheck feature. We’ll also look at tries and digraphs, two data structures that help us better analyze bodies of text.

Natural is a general natural language facility for nodejs. Tokenizing, stemming, classification, phonetics, tf-idf, WordNet, string similarity, and some inflections are currently supported.

natural

Natural Language Processing in JavaScript with Natural

The ability to pull in just about anything your project needs from npm is amazing, but it can also lead to bundle bloat if you aren't selective about what libraries you pull into your library. In this lesson, we'll take a look at bundlephobia.com, a tool that provides insights about a library's size. With bundlephobia, you can make informed decisions about what libraries you pull into your project and avoid unnecessary bundle bloat.

https://bundlephobia.com/

Make informed decisions about 3rd party npm libraries with bundlephobia

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

With Node.js installed, bootstrapping a react app is as simple as executing `create-react-app` with `npx`. No further downloads necessary.

Bootstrap a react app using create-react-app

Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 38 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need.

leaflet

While there are a few options for building maps, [Leaflet](https://leafletjs.com/) is the most popular. Lucky for us, Leaflet is also available as a ReactJS component library with [React Leaflet](https://react-leaflet.js.org/). We'll use both Leaflet and React Leaflet to build a map in our React app.

To get started, we need to install:

[Leaflet (npmjs.com)](https://www.npmjs.com/package/leaflet) and [React Leaflet (npmjs.com)](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-leaflet)

**[Click here for exercise instructions](https://github.com/colbyfayock/launchtime-workshop/tree/master/lessons/02%20-%20Adding%20Your%20First%20React%20Leaflet%20Map%20to%20a%20New%20React%20Application#1-installing-our-dependencies)**


Install Leaflet and react-leaflet with NPM in a JavaScript Project

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Nx has been design to work especially well in large monorepos. One particularity (compare to other monorepo solutions) is that Nx follows the principle of having one single version of a package in the entire workspace. That said, you'll have one version of React, one version of Angular etc.. This helps to keep things consistent, facilitates code sharing as well as easier migrations.
In this lesson we're looking into adding the [material-ui](https://material-ui.com/) package to our React app.

Install and use external npm packages in an Nx Workspace

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

node

Tests are really important in the software development cycle. But how we can test if our API - or even a page - will support the web traffic and requests our users will create by accessing them?

In this video, you will learn how to create HTTP load and benchmarking tests in Node.js using the autocannon package. With that, we can make sure our API is not consuming too much memory, CPU, or any other resource that can cause slow responses.

Create Load Tests in Node.js Using Autocannon

A lot of the power behind npm scripts is creating custom scripts that are outside the basic set that npm natively understands. In this lesson we will install the ESLint node package, create a new eslint npm script, briefly discuss about environment variables and how npm knows where to find your binary, and then execute our custom script from the command line.

Create a custom npm script

Often times you’ll have variations that you’ll want to make to your npm scripts and repeating yourself is inefficient and verbose. Instead you can create a base script and pass arguments into it from another script.

Pass arguments to npm scripts

In this lesson we will look at pulling out complex npm script logic into an external JavaScript file. Instead of writing bash scripts you can leverage your JavaScript abilities to automate your build process. We’ll use some helper node modules such as shelljs, opn-cli, and babel-cli. 

Create a node script to replace a complex npm script

In addition to package.json level variables (such as name and version), you can have custom conf settings that can be used in your npm scripts. These config values can be overridden outside of the package.json by using the npm config set command if necessary.

Use custom config settings in your npm scripts

The React team has an official Command Line Interface (CLI) for building React projects called "Create React App"; in this lesson, we show how to use this tool to quickly set up new projects using the `create-react-app {project-name}` command. We then use the npm scripts that are provided: `npm start` to develop, `npm run build` to ship, and `npm run eject` to opt out of the abstracted tooling.

The benefits of this tool are:
- It's officially maintained by the React team; this means best practices out of the box
- Zero config, one dependency
- Config is abstracted so React team can make improvements under the hood and you get the new goodness for free
- Clean command line output for errors
- You can "eject" at any time if needed

Set up React apps with zero configuration in two minutes

We will learn about “stemming,” the process of finding the root of words, often in order to group words by a common base root. We will look at the Porter and Lancaster Stemmers, briefly touch on Natural’s support for Russian and Spanish stemmers, and introduce the function to stem and tokenize at the same time.

Find the roots of words using stemming in Natural

Inflectors are the modifiers of a word that indicate grammatical categories. While Natural’s coverage of inflectors is not comprehensive, we will show how Natural can pluralize/singularize nouns and count numbers. 

Pluralizing nouns and counting numbers with inflectors in Natural

N-grams are sequences of words, where the 'n' stands for the number of words in the sequence. In this lesson, we will see how to find bigrams (2-grams), trigrams (3-grams), and any other length n-gram in a body of text. 

Find sequences of words (n-grams) using Natural

We will learn how to compare how similar two strings are to each other, examining three algorithms: Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, and Dice’s Coefficient.  

You should note that none of these algorithms are inherently better than the others. Instead, it's important to choose the one that best fits your text data. 

Compare similarity of strings through string distance in Natural

In this lesson, we will learn how to train a Naive Bayes classifier or a Logistic Regression classifier - basic machine learning algorithms - in order to classify text into categories.

Classify text into categories with machine learning in Natural

In this lesson, we will learn how to train a Naive Bayes classifier and a Logistic Regression classifier - basic machine learning algorithms - on JSON text data, and classify it into categories.

While this dataset is still considered a small dataset -- only a couple hundred points of data -- we'll start to get better results.

The general rule is that Logistic Regression will work better than Naive Bayes, but only if there is enough data. Since this is still a pretty small dataset, Naive Bayes works better here. Generally, Logistic Regression takes longer to train as well. 

This uses data from Ana Cachopo: http://ana.cachopo.org/datasets-for-single-label-text-categorization

Classify JSON text data with machine learning in Natural

Tries are a data structure that provide an efficient way to search for the existence of a word or phrase in a body of text, or to search by prefix. 

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