It's been a long journey of playing around and never finishing small projects until I started this and then it suddenly clicked. I had a bit of PHP and Rails experience prior to this, but Node was pretty much new to me, except for the JS part. The whole async mindset got me in to trouble a couple of times on this project.
The courses on Codeschool helped me tremendously, and this was fun to play around with: https://github.com/rvagg/learnyounode. I read a lot of blogs and some books (will get links later if you want), but mostly it was just trying until it clicked.