Good read
The book gave a much clearer initial picture (to me) of the Twisted system than the online documentation did. That said, this isn't the sort of book that I'll need to reference in the future. Perfect for bootstrapping, and now I'm off and running with the technical documentation.
Twisted Programmers must have
This book will take you through all the packages that will allow you to master the twisted programming.
Very clearly explains with examples several different situations in which twisted will help you to have your network programming asynchronous and fast.
Please save your money.
This book is nothing more than a handful of code examples that you can just as easily get from the web. There's nothing in the way of overall architecture, insightful approaches to using Twisted in an application setting, etc. Save your money and read the web pages. Worst O'Reilly book ever.
Disappointing
This book was disappointing to me. It does not cover Twisted fundamentals very well or comprehensively, but is rather a collection of few large code-examples and verbose commentary. For an introductory (or 'essentials' as the title state) material to Twisted, you are better off with the online manuals.
Granted, there are a few "oh - that's clever" moments in the book, but those are buried in the examples and hard to look up for future reference.
The bulk of the book shows examples for web clients and servers (simple stuff, not useful since easier-to-use and more powerful tools/libraries exist) and low-level pop, smtp, imap and nntp servers and clients (probably not very common in today's applications).
I haven't used Twisted extensively in a real project, but I have read the online docs and fiddled with small scripts - and the "new" things beyond them that I discovered reading this book can be counted on the fingers of one hand (namely Perspective Broker, authentication and SSH stuff).
I would have liked this book to be a more comprehensive overview of twisted's fundamentals and the base-protocols it provides - with more examples of custom protocols - since that's probably what most people turn to Twisted for.
THIS BOOK IS TWISTED!!!!
Are you a developer who wants to start building applications using twisted? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Abe Fettig, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that contains lots of examples of working code, with thorough notes and explanations of how you can use Twisted to do useful things.
Fettig, begins by covering downloading and installing Twisted, and some additional libraries, on the operating system of your choice. Then, the author shows you how you can use Twisted to make TCP connections to servers, and how to write a server that accepts TCP connections from clients. He continues by showing you how to use Twisted to work with the Web. Next, the author shows you how you can design a Twisted web application for programmatic accessing using the REST architectural style. Then he discusses the Twisted authentication framework, which provides an extremely flexible approach to authenticating users against different backends. He also demonstrates Twisted's powerful support for mail clients and servers. Then, he discusses Usenet clients and servers using the NNTP protocol. The author continues by covering Twisted's support for SSH. Finally, the author shows you how to use the tools Twisted provides for running and managing applications, which give you the ability to run daemon processes, use setuid and chroot to limit permissions, and write log files.
The goal of this most excellent book is to focus on practical examples of how to use Twisted to perform some of the most common tasks that face developers building network applications. More importantly, this book will help you to understand the key concepts and design patterns used in Twisted applications.
(11 reviews)
