When starting with Node.JS I did experience callback hell for about half a year before I found a good tutorial on how to manage the callbacks, and it finally clicked, since then, managing callbacks has become a second nature. The magic trick is to use named child functions instead of anonymous and self calling functions, so you can take advantage of the closure. I find programming this way even easier then writing in a serial non async language, because of the heavy use of function state instead of global state, and I love that in Node.JS modules are not just a "include file" and actually a object that works just like any other object, and can be used in function scope and closures. So instead of importing a bunch of variables to the top scope, you can require them locally and just by looking at the function you can see where all the variables come from, you don't have to know about the outside world to understand what the function does!