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[ZeroMQ: Messaging for Many Applications] [Author: Pieter Hintjens] [March, 2013]

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Dive into ØMQ (aka ZeroMQ), the smart socket library that gives you fast, easy, message-based concurrency for your applications. With this quick-paced guide, you’ll learn hands-on how to use this scalable, lightweight, and highly flexible networking tool for exchanging messages among clusters, the cloud, and other multi-system environments. ØMQ maintainer Pieter Hintjens takes you on a tour of real-world applications, using extended examples in C to help you work with ØMQ’s API, sockets, and patterns. Learn how to use specific ØMQ programming techniques, build multithreaded applications, and create your own messaging architectures. You’ll discover how ØMQ works with several programming languages and most operating systems—with little or no cost.

Paperback

First published October 22, 2012

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About the author

Pieter Hintjens

8 books21 followers
a software developer and past president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), an association that fights against software patents. In 2007, he was nominated one of the "50 most influential people in IP" by Managing Intellectual Property magazine.

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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
Profile Image for Babak Ghadiri.
34 reviews9 followers
September 27, 2021
با وجود اینکه قسمت زیادی از کتاب جزئیات پیاده‌سازی راه‌حل ها با 0MQ هست، ولی لزومی نداره که اون قسمتها دقیق خونده بشن. خیلی از مسائلی که درباره‌ی راه‌حلشون در 0MQ صحبت میکنه، قابل تعمیم به هر سیستم messaging (و کلا سیستم توزیع‌شده‌ی) دیگه‌ای هم هست و آشنایی با کلیات و جزئیات حلشون در 0MQ مفید هست. کلا معماری خود 0MQ هم جالب و آموزنده بود.
فصل ششم این کتاب با عنوان The 0MQ Community (در حد ۴۰ صفحه) به نظرم خیلی درخشانه مخصوصا قسمتهای Psychology of Software Architecture و Designing for Innovation. میشه جداگانه فقط این فصلِ غیرفنی رو خوند.
به نظرم اینکه نویسنده‌اش نظرات غیررایج و جدیدی داشت (خدا رحمتش کنه)، صرف نظر از درست یا غلط بودن، باعث میشه که آدم به درستی برخی از پیشفرضهاش شک بکنه و یه مقدار فکر کنه درباره‌اشون. در کل کتاب ابعاد غیرفنی خیلی جالبی داره که در سراسر متنش پخش شده.

نویسنده‌اش آدم جالبی بوده و بلاگ جالبی هم داره. مثلا:
http://hintjens.com/blog:115
Profile Image for Matt.
Author 1 book25 followers
September 27, 2013
I started reading this book to learn about how to use ZeroMQ, but I got way more than I anticipated out of it. The book's structure is basically: an API introduction, a set of progressively more complex examples demonstrating ZeroMQ's power, a semi-philosophical discussion of how the ZeroMQ community works, and a couple of chapters focusing on advanced architecture and system design with ZeroMQ as the hub.

Once the book progressed beyond the complex example chapters, readers are exposed to less code and more prose. Some developers might groan at this prospect because this is a code book, but I think the topic exploration was great. I learned about protocol definitions, the power of code generation, and other topics that I thought I would never be really interested in. Pieter managed to stretch my thinking in many ways and I am grateful for it.
Profile Image for Jon Gauthier.
129 reviews239 followers
July 1, 2013
ZeroMQ is one of those technologies today that have sizeable shares of breathless adherents. I had been aware of the hubbub over the open-source messaging library for quite some time when I heard that the popular online tutorial – known simply as “The Guide”, written by Pieter Hintjens, an author of ZeroMQ – would be made available in print and ebook. I snagged my chance to get a nice Kindle edition of the O’Reilly release. Apart from some serious formatting problems with the ebook (read on), I was extremely satisfied with the breadth and depth of this guide.

Hintjens abandons all pretense at the very beginning of Chapter 1, acknowledging the fervor of the community:

How to explain ØMQ? Some of us start by saying all the wonderful things it does. It’s sockets on steroids. It’s like mailboxes with routing. It’s fast! Others try to share their moment of enlightenment, that zap-pow-kaboom satori paradigm-shift moment when it all became obvious. Things just become simpler. Complexity goes away. It opens the mind. Others try to explain by comparison. It’s smaller, simpler, but still looks familiar.


Yes–the whole book is like that. Our author has a wonderfully lucid and light-hearted writing style [1] that keeps you focused during the long stretches of code.

And is there code! The majority of the book offers a tour through a dizzying array of ØMQ network patterns, each accompanied by a cute name and often a diagram. See, for example, the “Majordomo Pattern.”

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What follows this reasonably simple diagram is no less than 500 lines of C code. Inline. I appreciate this in some amount – there’s nothing more practical than a real implementation – but was blown away (rather, smothered by) the piles of code in this book. The density of the code hindered my reading experience, especially in the Kindle edition, where there were no bookmarks within sub-chapter sections to help me easily jump around between the massive code blocks. Many of the most important sections of the book that offered real, usable patterns were difficult to scan and reference later on given the lack of navigation aids. [2]

This publishing error, however serious, is my only major gripe with the book. I learned quite a lot about the core of ZeroMQ, and am now interested in exploring the bindings written for my everyday languages. [3] I’m excited to see how I can integrate the library at the core of horizontally scalable systems in the near future.

(Disclosure: I received an electronic copy of this book in exchange for writing a review.)

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Footnotes

1. This is likely something of a rarity, I’d assume, when it comes to guides on message-passing libraries.

2. To be fair, this would be much less of an issue with a physical book (or in the online guide, where much of the code is held externally and simply referenced by hyperlink). I am still disappointed by O’Reilly’s apparent lack of concern for the usability of this work’s ebook format.

3. The book does make reference to the large amount of language bindings available, but keeps all code in C.
50 reviews2 followers
September 22, 2025
It feels rather silly to add a technical book to my goodreads profile, but I read this one cover to cover so what the heck, why not?

I can't get enough of Hinten's relentless pragmatism. The message of solving actual problems over inventing over-engineered abstractions is one that anyone in any sort of technical position should embrace!
Profile Image for dcrystalj.
59 reviews2 followers
February 16, 2016
read 20% only. ZeroMQ should be simple but then you see it has so many cases and complications. I will probably not use this in my life but i will know where to look for it.
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