Good if you want to be convinced to try out 0mq, but to actually learn about it The Guide is awesome:

http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all

Also, I found this introduction very useful: http://nichol.as/zeromq-an-introduction

We use zeromq internally at dotcloud, and it's an absolute pleasure to work with. There is that weird obsession with asserts, but a lot of the problems we had with rabbitmq are gone.

May I ask what problems you had with rabbitmq? (Just curious.)

It was mainly due to older versions like 1.7 that crashed too often under pressure (ram usage mostly).

The situation got much better since 1.8 and especially 2.0.

The main reason zeromq is so awesome is that we can use it as an rpc protocol for almost everything.

That main reason doesn't apply only to zeromq, though; with google's protobuf you can write an rpc layer on top of pretty much any channel in ten or twenty lines of code.

Sure but with zeromq we get builtin load balancing and pub/sub.

ZeroMQ is not a serialization or RPC mechanism, but a smart routing system for packets of data. It doesn't even include one. Many people use google's protobuf with ZeroMQ.

As a relative newb, seeing what ZeroMQ can do had me slapping myself in the forehead. I wish I would've known about this when I was gouging my eyes out trying to build my own abstraction for ExactTarget's terrible groups system.

I just got done watching this video while sitting at a coffeeshop, and it was super useful, as I'd just started using 0mq on a client/server for testing fuzzing.

Utterly off-topic, but did he pronounce redis as "read-is"? Is that correct?

It's RED (emph) like the color, then 'iss'.

What'd this presentation have to say about Redis?

Nada. He just compared one of his sample APIs to redis. Don't have the exact quote, but it was something like, "this does a few basic things, similar to redis; put, get, etc."

Thank you. That's how I've been pronouncing it.