As part of a larger project to learn javascript, HTML/CSS, and other web dev skills, I've been working through the http://nodeschool.io/ exercises. I'm currently through 11/13 of the first series, "Learn you Node". I've had 2 books sitting around on javascript/node.js, but I've barely made a dent in them before I found this series. There's something about compressing the actual learning into bite-size "challenges" that nerd-snipes my brain into wanting to learn, work through the problem, and then branch out into more. It seems to be mostly unrelated to ease of acquiring the knowledge, as most of the reference material that I've been using to learn for the nodeschool exercises is just the online API documentation, which is well-written but less straightforward than the O'reilly books.

Of course, I was making steady progress on learning Lua, and that's mostly fallen by the wayside, so there are still no free lunches.