I'm currently reading this on SafariBooksOnline and I'm up to Part II.
Thoughts on Part I: * Lots of misspellings in the code examples. Sloppy. * Section that talks about arrays has errors (hint: call the filter function in your filter example, not foreach). * Asynchronous I/O could have been written in more detail for someone who has never dealt with it (e.g. ACE Reactor, select()). * Section entitled "Type hiccups" is very shallow in detail. Stack Overflow had a better explanation of the equality operator differences, which, in turn, were referenced from JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford.
Thoughts on Part II: * The IRC client in Chapter Six is incomplete. Should have a handler to at least print out the data returned by the IRC server.
General: * Section describing differences between vanilla JavaScript and V8 enhancements was very helpful
With some better proofreading/editing, this could be a 4 star book. If you've done programming using asynch I/O, events, buffers, then you will find this book to be a good overview of their equivalents in Node.js.
UPDATE (September 27th, 2013): I had to drop this down to one star, just for the fact that many of the examples do not work.
Does the author have a repository of his code samples on GitHub or Bitbucket? If so, I couldn't find it. The author should back up his examples with evidence that they work.
Закончил с книгой "Smashing Node.js" от Guillermo Rauch. Книга предназначена для ознакомления с веб разработкой на Node.js. Автор на простых примерах демонстрирует возможности технологии, начиная с работы с TCP стеком, и постепенно повышая уровень абстракции над протоколом до HTTP, затем до middleware framework-ов Connect.js и Express.js, потом немного работы с сокетами через Socket.io, и на последок работа с БД (NoSQL/SQL). Попутно рассматриваются несколько движком для серверной шаблонизации, юнит-тестирование Node.js, базовые принципы асинхронной обработки данных и пара-тройка полезных библиотек. В целом впечатления от книги остались нормальные, но каких-то откровений, архитектурных особенностей и деталей работы Node.js ждать от книги не стоит - это просто введение в технологию для людей более или менее знакомых с JavaScript. Итог: 4 бала.
Wast of your time. It's like a comics book about programming matters. Shallow. Boring. Official tutorials could give you much-much more than this pile of nice paper.