Hi Folks:

Clearly, the issues Twisted addresses are non->trivial requiring an appreciation of the problem space before considering Twisted as a solution (you gotta know there's a question before someone tells you the answer)... unfortunately, the barrier to Twisted entry at that point makes most walk away. I've seen lots of threads concluding, simply, that twisted looked interesting but was simply too dense to even get started with... so, they go ahead and roll their own solution, inevitably identifying the issues which form heart of the twisted architecture, but being too far along to refactor. And away we go.

I have barely scratched the surface of Twisted - some of my experiences and suggestions: 1) I found that Abe Fettig's book was a set of good training wheels. Not as good as say, Richard Steven's "UNIX Network Programming" that really saved my bacon when I was first learning socket programming. However Fettig's book is good in the sense that I can find a concrete example (HTTP RequestHandler), modify it a bit and it does something useful. Gets me going while I learn. Newbies need to build confidence with quick successes. Now I go to Twisted documentation that makes far more sense as I need much more technical detail about what Twisted is doing. If I had to alter Twisted documentation, I would make much of the stuff do concrete things, like get a web page. Perhaps I would, through surveys, pick the ten most common things new developers want to do, and show examples. 2) Pictures. Both Twisted documentation and Fettig's book lack pictures. When I was looking for a bug involving a Twisted call that never fired the callback, I took notes, peppered Twisted with logging statements, used a debugger and asked questions, lots of questions. The resulting control flow picture was sufficiently different from what I had in mind. That said, I would be tempted to do a simple client example and server example and illustrate the control flow, carefully matching the drawings with the illustrations. I know this is tough. Idioms: Perhaps this is closely related with common examples, but show common idioms. For example, how to call a database or a web server from a request handler. Or scheduling work with reactor.callLater or Tasks. Cheers, Andrew ____________________________________________________________________________________ Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile. Try it now. http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ