Tommi Virtanen wrote:

Hi. I just finished a review of the new O'Reilly book on Twisted, by Abe Fettig (hi Abe!), and thought you all might be interested in it:

http://tv.debian.net/articles/review-snakeball/

Wow, Tommi, thanks for the very thorough review. I'm seriously impressed. You picked up on a lot of details I'd missed, especially the places where I didn't follow best practices in the code examples. I'll get these incorporated into the official errata. And next time I'm definitely going to have you involved as an official tech reviewer. You have a talent for it. Overally I think you're accurate in pointing out the weaknesses of TNPE. There are a couple of points that I'll push back on, though: 1. "DO NOT BUY TNPE TO LEARN TO WRITE WEB APPS" Sigh. Writing the chapter on web servers was extremely frustrating. For years now Twisted web app developers have had two choices: use stable APIs that are widely considered to be broken and/or deprecated, or use new, improved APIs that are currently under heavy development and unstable. I put off writing this chapter for as long as possible, hoping that there'd be a stable release of twisted.web2 to write about, but it didn't happen. So in the end I decided it was better to document the current stable twisted.web code, for all its faults, than to try to document APIs that were in flux and very likely to change. Hopefully readers will understand that this chapter is explaining how to use the current twisted.web, not teaching the ideal architecture for web applications. On page 54 it says "The classes in twisted.web.resource and twisted.web.server are, as of this writing, widely considered to be past their prime. They have some serious shortcomings ... Both are scheduled to be deprecated in the future in favor of improved classes provided by a next-generation web package known as twisted.web2." It also says that if you're building a major web appication you should use Nevow. In retrospect, it probably would have been best to do both: include examples of the stable APIs, but write more about nevow and twisted.web2, including some examples. 2. It's not a Twisted Bible. This is certainly true. If you look at the oreilly.com page [1] you'll see that this book is in the "Developer's Notebook" series (http://devnotebooks.oreilly.com/). Here's how O'Reilly describes developer's notebooks: "A Developer's Notebook is just what it claims to be--the often frantic scribbling and notes that a true-blue alpha geek makes when working with a new language, API, or project. It's the no-nonsense code that solves problems, stripped of page-filling commentary that can often serve as more of a paperweight than an epiphany. It's hackery, focused not on what's nifty or might be fun if you've got some spare time, but what you need to simply make it work now. This isn't a lecture, folks; it's a lab." TNPE was written as a developer's notebook, and it shows. Unfortunately as I was getting close to finishing the book O'Reilly decided that the developer's notebook line wasn't doing very well and that they'd scrap the "notebook" design and naming convention in favor of the more familar animal book. I was happy to get a cool animal book cover, and my editor and I tried to pick a title that accurately portrayed the contents of the book. But in hindsight I think it would have been better to keep the developer's notebook name and design. When some people see an animal book they think "definitive guide", and then they're disappointed when it's something else. I hope that at least clarifies those points. This was my first book, and I'm proud of it, but at the same time I'm sure I have a lot to learn. Probably it's a lot like writing code, and somebody I'll look back on it and be able to see clearly all the things I did wrong :-). In any case, thanks for taking the time to read it and write this! Abe [1] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/twistedadn/ (you can see traces of the original "twisted - a developer's notebook" title in the URL)