Twisted Network Programming Essentials from O'Reilly is a task-oriented look at this new open source, Python-based technology. The book begins with recommendations for various plug-ins and add-ons to enhance the basic package as installed. It then details Twisted's collection simple network protocols, and helper utilities. The book also includes projects that let you try out the Twisted framework for yourself. For example, you'll find examples of using Twisted to build web services applications using the REST architecture, using XML-RPC, and using SOAP.

Written for developers who want to start building applications using Twisted, this comprehensive guide presents examples of the most common tasks you'll face when building network applications. It also helps you understand the key concepts and design patterns used in Twisted applications. Here are just some of the topics discussed in Twisted Network Programming Essentials:

• Installing Twisted

• How to make TCP connections

• How to use Twisted to work with the Web

• Twisted's authentication framework

• Usenet and SSH clients and servers

Along the way, each lesson is supported by thorough notes and explanations to make absolutely certain you're up to speed with this leading-edge Python technology.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 16 Ratings

Not for LEARNING Twisted - 2009-01-04
Reviewer Rating:
When I first received this book, I saw that it was short and rejoiced. I usually never get through a 400 or 500 page programming book, because I get the early concepts, and then go off on a tangent, using the concepts in some way or another.

This book disappointed me. It went through some of the concepts of Twisted without really going into the details about some of the best parts of Twisted. The concepts of deferreds and the reactor event loop were skimmed over too quickly, and I never felt like I knew enough to implement any sort of server in Twisted.

There are better resources on the web to learn to develop with Twisted than this book provides.

Disappointing - 2009-10-02
Reviewer Rating:
On the upside, this book is obviously written by someone who knows Twisted well, and shares the values of its developers.

On the downside, one of those shared values seems to be "documentation doesn't matter."

Twisted is well-known for being very poorly documented, forcing developers to regularly scan through mountains of abstracted source to find out what they need. I was hoping that this book would address that issue, by clearly documenting how and why Twisted works, what the different interfaces are, etc.

Unfortunately, it doesn't; instead, it only leads you through a number of canned examples. As soon as you want to step outside of any of the capabilities that's covered in them, you're on your own.

Superficial book - 2009-09-05
Reviewer Rating:
I'm a bit disappointed about this book. All the information included in the different chapters can be found on the Internet, same goes for the examples. In my opinion there is no added value w.r.t. googling twisted python.

Outdated and Missing Fundamentals - 2009-08-28
Reviewer Rating:
The book is not up to date with the latest Twisted release. Unfortunately, the changes in the new framework are material and the book is a little misleading.

In addition, the Twisted framework is a different paradigm but the book does a poor job of explaining how things work and how to get things working.

It does have some good examples of things that are really powerful in Twisted.

eh, could be better, could be worse - 2008-12-15
Reviewer Rating:
The book was a very basic introduction to twisted. For the most part it will really only benefit someone who is relatively new to Python and needs to perform some quick network programming.

The tutorials described were good to get someone familiar with the syntax and to show the basic implementation of twisted, but more time is spent reading the book then it would take just to get the documentation and learn it hands on. Any programmer that has poured a few hours into researching code and documentation would feel that this book was a waste of time.

So if you are new to Python and need to learn network programming this book should be able to point you in the right direction, but if you are an experienced programmer, just use the documentation on the website and donate some money to the maintainers instead.

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