Honestly, if you have ever done anything substantial in JavaScript then asynchronous functions with a callback pattern should not be such an issue.

Perhaps if your background is more on the lines of traditional server-side web development (ie. PHP, Django, Rails) then this is some new territory.

Sure, everyone has to start somewhere, and to be perfectly honest, I ran into many of the same issues.

The difference is in what happened afterward. What I did then was to try to understand why Node.js did things differently and how I could accomplish my goals in an idiomatic way. I didn't try to shoe-horn in my existing mental framework for how things should work, and then throw my hands in the air when they didn't.

However, what I didn't do was immediately run to Alert the Internets about what "A Giant Step Backward" Node.js is.