Node.js and CouchDB are two very interesting technologies which are well worth exploring. Windows users can get prebuilt binaries/installers from the following locations.

• A self-contained Node.js installation for Windows can be downloaded from http://node-js.prcn.co.cc/
• An installer for CouchDB on Windows can be downloaded from https://github.com/dch/couchdb/downloads
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Update: to follow the examples in the O’Reilly online book (http://guide.couchdb.org/) Windows users will need to download curl (a command line utility).

I have installed all the above on my desktop PC and so far everything is working well.