for an intro to Node this book is great. but keep in mind that this book is really not designed to teach Javascript or programming but assumes your kind of there already. some of the samples are overly complex, that is not to say they are not good and certainly need to be in the book but somethings for teaching should be done with more simple blocks first. I will like to see more reference material which this book does not have enough in my mind. I would still say though this is the best Node book I've seen and I like the cross platform details in the book.