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.
Go abe! Congrats on your completion of the book.
w00t! Please include Palo Alto on your book tour : )
[...] Summer of Code — Phase 1, complete Upcoming book on twisted Abe Fettig is done w/ writing a book on twisted. Cool. This ent [...]
This is great news. I’m looking forward to reading this. Does this mean that we can look forward to documentation on Yarn soon? %-)
Congratulations!
This is great news, congratulations on completion of what I’m sure will be an essential read.
Congrats, Abe. I’ve been looking high and low for tutorials on Twisted, and a book like this is a gold mine. How can I get an autographed copy? :-)
Grig
Thats cool news!
Thanks, everyone! Dethe: yes, this does mean I’ll be working on Yarn docs. That’s one of my priorities for next week. Grig: of course! :-)
Absolutely Superb ! I truly cannot wait to get my hands on it :)
[...] ks for boring days qu object oriented programming language open source document management a book on twisted? regex for urls! statistical data mining tuts
[...]
Congratulations, Abe ! This book will be absolutely cool and will have a special place in my shelf !
Super.. I’ll be buying the book as soon as it hits the shelves..
Do you have time to help me with Hep now?
;)
[...] 43 Places Speding lots of fun time here now (tags: RubyOnRails SocialSoftware) Abe Fettig – My Book on Twisted (tags: bittorrent) HomebrewPSP Converter 1.1.1 – Ma [...]
Congratulations Abe, I predict this will cut down on deferred-related questions in #twisted by roughly %700 :)
I’d be interested in getting my hands on some help right now. Is there a way for me to get perhaps a digital copy of this sooner rather than later? I don’t care if it’s a stripped-down, partial copy that only gets me a web server up and running, I’ve been handed a project and have quite little to work with as yet. Of course, I have a mid/ late-August deadline. . .that’s life.
Anyway, I won’t be crushed if you can’t help, directly or link-ly.
Thanks for your work thus far, I am gladly going to begin digging through the pages.
-Max S.
Congratulations, I hope this book will give a valueble resources to the developers who wants master the Twisted Network Programming Framework
Congratulations, I hope this book will give a valueble resources to the developers who wants master the Twisted Network Programming Framework
[...] e up to this year, which has had it’s share of highlights so far: a talk at PyCon, a book announcement, and an exciting new project. It’s interesting to look at how ma [...]
This is something I am in need of. I’ve put my order in:
http://www.bookpool.com/sm/0596100329