Honestly, I don't think there is a real shortcut for in depth knowledge of how secure authentication should work. I think if your going to be writing a program with authentication, you need to know what is going on, what the framework is doing under the hood. If you don't, you are likely to misconfigure it or trust it to do something it doesn't do.

Writing a secure auth isn't exactly hard, and there is good info on the web about it. It just requires time to implement and not taking shortcuts to do it right.

In node there are not really official solutions - it's just packages. Php has a nice password_hash function which hashes and salts your password for you securely.