Reading over this ( http://gonzalo123.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/web-console-with-node-js/ ) , I felt this was a pretty good and relatively real world example of nodeJS’s capabilities. I did find one line near the end very poignant and reflective of my own opinions at the end of the show & tell post
I don’t know if node.js is the future or is just another hype, but it’s easy. And cool. Really cool.
I’ve started self-teaching myself NodeJS and not surprisingly there was a recent popular reddit link pointing to a not very short introduction to nodejs here ( http://anders.janmyr.com/2011/05/not-very-short-introduction-to-nodejs.html ) . At this point I haven’t found any good books for reference lookup… but hopefully in a week or so I’ll have gotten spooled up enough to be able to report back.
In the meantime as I use Ubuntu for everything but games, this short article here ( http://www.codediesel.com/linux/installing-node-js-on-ubuntu-10-04/ ) was enough to get a working environment running though I recommend using a pristine virtual machine instance to keep things simple.
Last point, a reliable friend & peer of mine recommended I check out this MVC like framework for NodeJS ( http://expressjs.com/ ). Preliminary it feels like a hybrid between Twistd and CherryPy in Python or Limonade PHP as far as style… aiming more for simplicity over feature/complexity.