I think the modules which tackle very common functionality do naturally rise to the top, and end up being well-maintained and fairly standard throughout the community. A good example is mikael's request (https://github.com/mikeal/request) which I suppose is a urllib2 equivalent.
Modules like this are constantly referenced in other modules, and in tutorials etc. By scrolling down this list (https://npmjs.org/browse/depended) you can get a sense of which modules now form the community curated 'standard library' for node - if you were a new node dev looking for a very common piece of functionality for your project, this might be a good place to start looking.
Modules like this are constantly referenced in other modules, and in tutorials etc. By scrolling down this list (https://npmjs.org/browse/depended) you can get a sense of which modules now form the community curated 'standard library' for node - if you were a new node dev looking for a very common piece of functionality for your project, this might be a good place to start looking.