This is not a survey work.
Ted Roden takes a smattering of use cases and dives deep, building non-trivial sample applications to demonstrate the how-to of adding realtime features to your web application.
The book will be exceptionally useful if you are using a technology stack similar to the author's (python and google app engine play critical roles), and have use cases similar to those explored in the book. Even without a good match, this is a very useful book simply because Roden really does understand his subject matter, and highlights the most important concepts to understand along the way. The writing is clear. The structure makes sense.
In organization, the book begins with chapters that build well constrained applications to demonstrate some basic patterns. Roden covers syndication (SUP, PubSubHubbub), basic browser polling mechanisms including explanation of JSONp and long polling, server side mechanisms for dealing with high concurrency and data throughput (Tornado), chat, IM, SMS, and Analytics. The book concludes with the building of a reasonably meaty game that adds authentication and geolocation to the preceding concepts.
These patterns cover a wide range of common realtime design problems, but they are not presented as a comprehensive survey of available tools and patterns. For the reader interested in grasping the range of possible tools, this will be a somewhat frustrating book. For the reader who has no intention of using Python or Google App Engine, there is a lot of material that at first seems skim-worthy. However, Roden's strength is in his pragmatic get-it-done approach. The details of his implementations are important, and his low-level discussions are a mistake to skip.
I could imagine a more useful book for the purpose of a systematic exploration of realtime technologies and patterns, but in the absence of such a volume, this one has a lot of wisdom for developers starting to dip their toes in the realtime waters.
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2012
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