It was over a year ago when I started taking on a new adventure and weaned myself off of Ruby in favor of Node.js. I started learning Javascript initially by manipulating the DOM and then ventured into server-side scripting with Node.js. My initial Node project was S3Motion, but I wanted to learn how to use a web framework. Express.js is the de-facto standard because it's been battle tested and has lots of support. I immediately found that as I tried to create a CRUD web app, it wasn't as easy as using Rails. There were so many opinionated blog posts and semi-finished examples that there wasn't a single source that showed everything from start to finish. I decided to enter a writing competition sponsored by AirPair detailing the process, soup to nuts, and actually WON! Check out the article How to Create a Complete Express.js + Node.js + MongoDB CRUD and REST Skeleton (login with GitHub to see all the code snippets instead of the garbage). This sparked my most popular GitHub repo express-node-mongo-skeleton that has been getting new stars and forks weekly.
I took this effort and decided to submit a few conference talks based on it and had a few acceptances. Full Stack Toronto published the talks on YouTube so you can watch the presentation. Now you have all the tools necessary to make the switch from Ruby on Rails to the MEN (Mongo + Express.js + Node.js) stack. Good Luck!