I finally finished working through the exercises in the LearnYouNode suite put out by NodeSchool, which organizes events in cities all over the country. They have a whole pile of different self-directed workshops. It was decent enough introduction to the subject and gets you to do basic things like basic file I/O and server operations (answering HTTP requests and so on). It really helped me get used to the asynchronous operations and JavaScript callbacks in general. I’ve also worked through some of a Udemy course on Node.js and will have to finish that up before too long. I’m guessing that it’ll be much easier to handle having completed the LearnYouNode workshop.
It’s actually not easy to find third party web hosting services that support Node (1&1 and a lot of the standard services like GoDaddy don’t, for example) so it’s more likely to be hosted on local machines. Local machines, of course, can be as small as a Raspberry PI (a surprisingly popular application), as average as your desktop machine, as big as a local server, or as huge as server farms that get as big as you’d like.
I’ve volunteered to serve as a mentor at the next NodeSchool hosted in Baltimore, which happens every two or three months on a Saturday from 1:00-5:00 pm. I expect I’ll start off just helping the folks working through the basic JavaScripting exercises to start. I’ve attended a few Saturdays in DC and had fun hanging out with people and working through the exercises.