[Twisted-Python] Re: My review of Abe's book "Twisted Network Programming Essentials"

[Tommi Virtanen]

Abe Fettig wrote:
> 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.

I understand you very well. Personally, I would probably have skipped
most of the server-side web chapter, maybe talking only about the proxy
and perhaps show things like static.File. Or maybe I would have just
dropped the whole chapter.

I'm 100% with you here, this is a difficult time for web development.
I got seriously burned with the whole Woven thing. Besides, Woven was a
better name than Nevow (*cough* *cough* ;)

Hopefully there will be a time when we have t.web2, with a
rendering-only Nevow on top of it, and there will be a usable
liveevil^Wlivepage^Wathena^Wwhatever, and maybe nufox, etc..
and then, maybe then, there will be a book about all that. There's
definitely enough material in web apps to fill a book, and I happen
to have a decent plan for one, if I ever find the time and motivation..

> 2. It's not a Twisted Bible.
> 
> TNPE was written as a developer's notebook, and it shows. Unfortunately

Oh, don't get me wrong. There's nothing _wrong_ in it not being the
Twisted Bible -- in fact, I think Twisted is still to young and
fast-moving to really be ready for a Bible. I'm just trying to make
people know what they are going to buy.

> 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.

You _should_ be proud of it, it's a good book, and on a subject that
definitely needed a book out. Good work.