Welcome to the Introduction to Node.js course! Over the coming weeks, we'll delve into the basics of Node.js, its ecosystem, and its impact on server-side development using JavaScript. Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that works across different platforms and is built on Chrome's V8 engine. It allows developers to create server-side applications in JavaScript, a language typically used for client-side scripting in web browsers. Node.js stands out for its efficient handling of multiple tasks simultaneously, thanks to its event-driven and non-blocking I/O model. This makes it ideal for building scalable and responsive web applications.