I just jumped on node a few days ago. People who are already comfortable with programming with events and closures in Javascript are going to try Node and say

I just jumped on node a few days ago. People who are already comfortable with programming with events and closures in Javascript are going to try Node and say things like "where has this been all my life?". In those few short days Node has highlighted to me just how dramatic of an impact a tool that is close to your language/model of choice can have on your ability to rapidly turn ideas into working code. For a cross section of coders that work with jQuery all day, Node will be a big deal. Node has some really friendly and highly productive people working behind it, chief among them Ryan Dahl ( http://github.com/ry http://github.com/ry ). To learn Node's ins and outs and have some fun, I spent this weekend building out a simple node-based MapReduce-like work unit processor and needed a lot of random help along the way. When I needed gzip ( http://github.com/waveto/node-compress http://github.com/waveto/node-compress ), or to communicate with Unix command processes, or a redis client ( http://github.com/fictorial/redis-node-client/ http://github.com/fictorial/redis-node-client/ ), the Node community was there to help me very quickly. Simply said, Node.js is a very productive and fun environment for weekend hacks, and I expect it to become a primary fixture in my toolbox in the coming months. [edit: added links]