My Book on Twisted
Regular readers of this blog (is it an oxymoron to refer to regular readers of an irregularly updated blog?) may have observed that since last November the amount of posts has decreased noticeably. Some of you may have surmised that this is due to my new job at JotSpot, another familar case of blogger-gets-hired-and-drops-off-the-radar (see also: “Choate, Brad“). There’s some truth to this: one of the reasons I started blogging is to get my name out there to potential clients and employers, and there’s less of incentive to sell yourself when you have a job that you enjoy and are excited about.
But there’s something else that’s has a far greater impact on my blogging, and it’s this: I’ve been writing a book about Twisted. The working title is Twisted Network Programming Essentials. The publisher is O’Reilly. It should be hitting bookshelves in early October.
Writing this book has been a lot of work, much more than I expected when I began the project (Jason Fried, who’s written a book of his own, tried to tell me this before I started, but I had to experience it for myself). It’s been taking up pretty much every ounce of my free time, and some time that wasn’t really free, for the past six months. That’s the primary reason I haven’t been writing here much (or writing docs for Yarn: sorry craig!). All my writing energy has been going into the book.
Now it’is just about done, which is very satisfying. I almost can’t believe it, actually: I wrote a book! I’m happy with the way it’s come together, and excited to get it into the hands of readers. Twisted has historically had a steep learning curve, and some of the modules have lacked enough documentation to let people discover how incredibly useful they are. I hope this book will open up Twisted development to a new pool of developers, those who want to write cool network applications but haven’t had the time or dedication to read the source, sign up for the mailing list, and ask questions on IRC. The Twisted developer community has been great to me, and I hope this book is an asset to the project.
My book isn’t a complete reference to all of Twisted. It doesn’t cover all the modules, and it doesn’t offer a complete API reference to those modules that it does cover (I look forward to reading the 600-page Programming Twisted when somebody else writes it). What it does is give people working examples of clients and servers using HTTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, NNTP, XML-RPC, SOAP, Perspective Broker, and SSH. It also explains how to use Deferreds, write custom protocols, access databases, use twisted.cred for authentication, manage multiple services, and run apps with twistd. It’s designed to help smart developers get started writing apps with Twisted as quickly as possible. If you’re interested in Twisted, I hope you’ll check it out.
