My general approach was exactly as outlined in the "Suggested Implementation Approach" portion of the project instructions. I first gathered and organized all of the command line arguments, and then proceeded to make the basic socket connection. From there I gradually increased complexity by handling more commands.
My first challenge was figuring out how to "not attempt to read a response from the server". After some testing it turns out that I don't need to do anything (at least in Javascript) to make this happen, as the way to receive data from a socket in Javascript is by using the socket.on('data', callback) method.
I relied on using the ls command for the majority of my testing. However, when I was implementing the mkdir and rmdir functions, I did not have ls set up yet. So I could not test the mkdir and rmdir functions until I implemented ls. Also, I heavily relied on console log statements to debug and to see what data I was getting via the socket.