The ZeroMQ Guide [1] (originally by Pieter Hintjens, now maintained by the community) is undoubtedly one of the best pieces of technical writing I've ever encountered - like another commenter posted, it's worth reading even if you will never use ZeroMQ.

[1]: http://zguide.zeromq.org

> originally by Pieter Hintjens

Some context (because it's been 3 years already!) :

Cancer diagnosis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520888

Legacy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12650682

More: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Pieter+Hintjens

Wow, I disagree -- I find this incredibly difficult to wade through. It's full of marketing fluff and pointless tangents. I gave up after the first several pages.

I'm not sure I agree. It reminded me of certain "great" textbooks that sometimes get recommended by experts, that aren't actually that great for someone learning something for the first time. They get the reputation as being "great" because they are great for people that already have a good basic grasp of the material: They are precise and pithy, and they contain insights that are deep and useful, but hard to appreciate if this is your first encounter with the material. (Kleppner & Kolenkow would be a good example of a freshman physics textbook in this category.) It seems to me that maybe the ZeroMQ Guide is in this category. Which, of course, is a noble and important category, but maybe not the most important category if you're just starting out on a topic.

I'd like to disagree. The first time I read the guide was after my first programming internship during college and didn't really have a background in distributed computing or message queues. I only knew how to read and write code good enough for a CRUD based web app. I understood sockets though.

I found this book a great introduction to MQ and distributed computing in general. I didn't read cover to cover but I remember reading around 2/3rds of the book and didn't find it super hard to follow even though I did have to reread some sections. Also I must mention I was implementing a toy ZeroMQ project while I was reading the book.

That's fair - on the other hand if you already understand the principles of messaging (maybe from Hohpe, or some other introduction to pi calculus), it's a great piece of writing about an otherwise dry topic - a C library.

I love the way you expressed this.

I'll say that docs are delightful to read and beautifully explain the domain. I would recommend going through them even if you never use the ZMQ itself.

I remember reading the ZeroMQ docs when I was first learning about concurrency. Those plus Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang book were really fun and eye opening.

I never used ZeroMQ much but it taught me a lot of the language around distributed and high-concurrency systems and problems that come up.

Do you have an opinion on which to read first?

Not OP but if you're on the edge, try reading the first few chapters of the ZeroMQ guide. It does not make a lot of assumptions about the reader's background in computing.

I read the docs a couple of years ago but never got to actually use ZMQ for anything. Is it still worth considering for new projects?

Yes, nothing else comes close. The nanomsg author seems to have abandoned nanomsg.

Typically software infrastructure like 0MQ, ext2fs, Valgrind, HotSpot, and gzip takes about a decade to get good, remains optimal for a decade or two, and remains relevant for half a century after that. A couple of years is not a long time.

I tried reading for a while and still do not even know what MQ stands for.

Message Queue

Great points! I'd like to add that RabbitMQ is an easier option if it has enough number of features that'd cover your needs. So, it might be better to checkout ready solutions before diving into a MQ framework.

Yes, they aren't nearly as similar as the names suggest. Like PostgreSQL vs. ext4fs.

> it's not something that you will be able to understand and use right away.

I think it took me an hour or three to get some benchmarking programs running when I first encountered it, but that was mostly because I was using the documentation for the wrong major version. So I don't think it's such a big hassle. I definitely continued to learn important things about it for months, though.

It's definitely not a message queuing system like RabbitMQ, though. It's something much simpler and more general.