Hi guys, I've been doing it all on Ubuntu so far but I'm going to consolidate down to doing all my work on a Mac for a while here. Apt-get made a lot of sense to me and I'm wondering if I should learn ports or homebrew first just as far as what the NodeJS community might be using more often.
Jerome,
If you want to have a little more control, either compile from source or grab a binary:
I tend to put them under a directory structure like: $HOME/.local/nodejs/0.10.7
To make that version active in your shell, you add the path to that version's "bin" directory to your $PATH, and add "share/man" to $MANPATH.
To switch to a new version (if you ever need to do that -- most people do not, but some OCD people like me do), you can update the $PATH and $MANPATH variables.
To automate that process, you can check out any of the available version switchers for node.