[mlLK]

OT but Anyone actively pumping out stuff for node.js? I just installed it on my slice last week; it took me about an 30-40 minutes to get through the README :| (mostly due to some missing dependencies), flipped through man, and was like wtf I'm doing. . .point being, it seemed like it'd take some serious investment to, first, figure what you're doing, and, second, to produce something interesting.

Coolest application I've seen come out of node.js is http://mrdoob.com/125/Multiuser_Sketchpad_HTML5. I'd be interested in what others are doing in it; let alone, how they got about doing they wanted to do in it.

[dpritchett]

A great way to get comfortable with node.js is to read github projects that are using it. I've got a few at github.com/dpritchett but I'd particularly recommend anything at http://github.com/jashkenas . Dig into some of the NodeKO winners and see if you can find source code, too.

stephank's orona (html5 tank game) is a neat project: http://github.com/stephank/orona

[pjscott]

I would go so far as to say that the greatest strength of node.js is the way people crank out interesting and possibly useful code and stick it on github. This makes it very easy to dive in and start hacking.

I would particularly recommend checking out socket.io, and maybe some of the projects using it. It's a way of doing realtime browser-server communication, which uses websockets if the browser supports it, and a variety of increasingly ugly fallbacks on browsers that are old and/or made by Microsoft. You can make some very cool stuff with it.

Also, definitely get npm, the node package manager. It makes installing libraries much easier:

http://github.com/isaacs/npm