Twisted

"Twisted": http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/twistedadn/index.html by Abe Fettig

I'm always tremendously impressed with anyone that really understands and uses Twisted. It seems somehow magical, and hard to understand to me. I've tried multiple times to learn the framework, and haven't had much luck. I've been hoping for an O'Reilly Twisted book for a long time now, so it's pretty exciting to finally have one in my hand.

I was initially surprised at how slim the book is, it's only 236 pages. I expected a giant door stop of a book. Instead of trying to cover the entire scope and breadth of Twisted, Fettig goes with a much more "recipe" like approach to learning Twisted. Each chapter covers a different part of the Twisted framework, with specific examples of how you can use it to address a particular server issue.

All in all, I'm happy with this book. I was able to write a basic http proxy server, which I plan on expanding for a project at work, as well as a mail server that I want to use for some mailing list functions. Fettig does a great job of cutting through a lot of the difficult areas of Twisted, and present us with good examples to give us a jump start on the steep Twisted learning curve. I do wish that this book was closer to 500 pages, and included comprehensive API documentation. Twisted is a big framework, and really deserves a definitive "tome" style book. I'm still really happy with this book, and am glad to see Twisted getting some attention in print.