Twisted Network Programming Essentials

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 236 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc. October 20, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0596100329
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596100322
• Book Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 14.1 ounces

Product Description
"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.



About The Author


Abe Fettig is a software developer, which means he designs and builds software. Abe specializes in making it easier and more fun to communicate and share information over the Internet. He's been writing web and Internet appications since 1998.

Abe is currently employed as a software engineer for JotSpot, helping develop the world's first (and best) application Wiki. He also maintains the Hep and Yarn open source projects, which make it easier to transfer and manage messages between blogs, email, and rss using the Twisted networking framework. Abe's book Twisted Network Programming Essentials was published by O'Reilly in 2005.

Abe lives in southern Maine with my wife, Hannah. He works mostly out of his home office but periodically visits the San Francisco Bay area. You can contact Abe by sending email to abe@fettig.net.

Reader Reviews
Check out the table of contents: The chapters are Getting Started, Building Simple Clients and Servers, Web Clients, Web Servers, Web Services and RPC, Authentication, Mail Clients, Mail Servers, NNTP Clients and Servers, SSH, and finally Services, Processes, and Logging. That's a lot of distinct subjects in a two-hundred page book. The result is a good demonstration of how broad Twisted's domain is, but the chapters, for the most part, do not build on one another. While that allows you to skip the chapter on news servers and read the SSH chapter without much difficulty, it also means you're getting lots of separate chunks of knowledge that don't add up to anything greater than the sum of their parts. I was hoping to see more material on general topics that apply to all Twisted programs. Interfaces are one example. Interfaces, as used in Twisted, are not a part of the Python standard library and I would not assume a reader to be familiar with them. But while Interfaces do come up in a number of the examples, nowhere does the author take the time to explain why you're importing from zope.interface or how and where Twisted uses them. Yes, there are examples, but nothing to help you understand the theory for when you have to write your own code. Nowhere do we learn how to write tests for asynchronous functions. While the last chapter touches on the organization of services in a Twisted application, it fails to note basics like what method you'd want to implement to run tasks during a graceful shutdown. In all the attention to different network protocols, the framework aspect of Twisted seems to have been neglected. So overall, if you want to embed an email server in your application, this book will give you a place to start. If you want a hard copy text to demonstrate the range of applications Twisted can reach, this book will do that. But if your main concern is that Twisted makes your head hurt and you want someone to make it seem less alien, I'm not sure this is the book you've been waiting for.