Ask HN: Learning HTTP - writing a web server in which language?

I've been on a hiatus to study and prepare for web development jobs since I've decided to switch half an year ago. I have appr. 8 years of prior programming experience with mainly C/C++ doing CAD-related and video games programming.

In the past 6 months, I've read numerous books and wrote I would say a lot of toy-ish and not so toy-ish code using plain vanilla PHP, Smarty templates, Zend frameworks apps, WordPress plugins, that sort of things. Recently, I've started implementing some mini projects using Twitter API and the real-time protocols over HTTP (SUP, PubSubHubbub) and I felt the need to know HTTP a lot more. So, after a little research I found (maybe) the perfect book: "Illustrated Guide to HTTP" by Paul Hethmon. It's about learning the details of HTTP by writing a minimalistic web server in C.

Since I don't program in C anymore and thought that I will not benefit fully if I wrote the server by the book in a language that I'm quite familiar, I was wondering which programming language to choose to implement the server in? I think in my position it boils down to:

* PHP: I'm comfortable programming in it, it can expand my knowledge by the usage of the standard libraries.

* server-side JavaScript using Node.js: I think I can comfortable write server-like code in JS, but I only know about Node.js for instance, not programmed in it. I guess it will not be too hard with the Node.js/JS code-test-debug cycle on Windows, will it?

Thanks