Express APIs

React and Next.js get you the frontend, but every real application needs a backend — something to handle requests, talk to a database, enforce auth, and expose an API the frontend can actually call. Express is the minimal, unopinionated framework that's powered Node.js backends for over a decade, and understanding it properly means you're not just copying middleware from Stack Overflow — you know what's actually happening in the request/response cycle.

This course teaches you how to build Express APIs the way they're actually structured in production — not a single `server.js` file with everything crammed in, but proper routing, middleware layering, error handling, and a project structure that scales past a weekend project. You'll go from your first route handler to authentication, database integration, and deploying a real API.

Every module ends with a hands-on project. You'll build a REST API from scratch, add authentication with JWTs, and ship a full backend service connected to PostgreSQL that you'll actually deploy. By the end of the course, you'll be able to design clean REST APIs, structure an Express project properly, and reason about what middleware is doing instead of treating it as a black box.