I can second this as a good way of learning. The Node.js site links to a very readable long polling chat app here: http://github.com/ry/node_chat http://github.

I can second this as a good way of learning. The Node.js site links to a very readable long polling chat app here: http://github.com/ry/node_chat http://github.com/ry/node_chat. I learned the framework by modifying this into an IRC-style party game am now working on mobile clients for it.