After making my first pass through the jQuery Learning Center (I'm sure I'll be back again) I moved on to another free learning resource: NodeSchool is a collection of resources for learning Node.js, including some self-training tutorials.

At the top of the page they point newcomers to the workshop titled "LearnYouNode". This workshop has the subtitle "Learn You The Node.js For Much Win!" This raised my eyebrows. It wasn't immediately obvious that the broken English was a running gag of some sort. I don't know what it is... maybe LOLcat?

Not knowing it was a gag, I thought maybe the tutorial were written by people for whom English was not their primary language. I was worried I would get stuck trying to figure out if I'm misunderstanding broken English or misunderstanding Node.js.

Fortunately, it only took a paragraph of two of tutorial instructions to make it clear the lessons are not, in fact, broken English. Which was very good news because there was very little hand-holding. The audience is presumed to be competent developers off the bat. It actually assumed JavaScript skill level a bit higher than what I have! Fortunately close enough I could get through with some educational web searches.

The overview workshop sped me through some Node.js basics. Even better: After I successfully completed each challenge, it will show me the official answer which inevitably differed from my solution. I learned a lot from the answer key source code which I hope will help my JavaScript skills going forward.

One of the things LearnYouNode introduced me to is NPM. The Node.js Package Manager came up repeatedly in many of my previous explorations, and I knew I had to get a handle on it soon. I've only got a taste so far, and there's a whole other workshop dedicated to the topic. I think that's a good place to go next.