Twisted Network Programming Essentials [Paperback]

Abe Fettig (Author)

Book Description

Series: Essentials | Publication Date: October 27, 2005

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Abe Fettig is a software developer and maintainer of Hep, an open source message server that makes it possible to transparently route information between RSS, email, weblogs, and web services. He speaks frequently at software conferences including PyCon and lives in Portland, Maine with his wife, Hannah.

Product Details

• Paperback: 238 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (October 27, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596100329
• ISBN-13: 978-0596100322
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,325 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 51 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The first Twisted book has made it to press. Is it the book you've been waiting for?, November 2, 2005

By 

Kevin Turner "software enthusiast" (North America) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Twisted Network Programming Essentials (Paperback)

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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, July 19, 2006

By 

Arnar Birgisson (Reykjavík, IS Iceland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Twisted Network Programming Essentials (Paperback)

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.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Please save your money., July 20, 2007

By 

Lee Crawford - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Twisted Network Programming Essentials (Paperback)

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.