I started programming in the era when to play a game, you had to type it in by hand. To this day, I still learn best by following along with an extended tutorial; getting it to work initially and then playing around with it to see what happens.
I was delighted to find Manuel Kiessling's The Node Beginner's Book. What a little gem of a tutorial. It starts from the obligatory node http application, and then extends it to deal with real world problems like asynchronous handlers, listening to events, organizing the code, and more; without going too deep. As he states, it's designed to be the tutorial he wishes he had when he first started, and you'll go from beginner to advanced beginner.
This repository is the current state of my riff on his example. I'm really digging CoffeeScript, so I decided it would help to re-create the sample in CoffeeScript. There are some parts of my code that I think could be prettier. There are some discoveries you may find useful, but please buy the book and follow along for yourself.
- The repository for this source is here at GitHub.
- The Annotated Source is the GitHub page for this repository.
- The Blog Post contains a little more behind the scenes.