Early Thoughts on the Upcoming XMPP Book

January 6, 2009

Over the holidays I have been doing a technical review of the upcoming XMPP book “XMPP: The Definitive Guide”. It’s currently available as a rough cut from O’Reilly and I expect the final version is getting near. I still have a bit to go, but so far I think it is fantastic.

This will be a great introduction and reference to a lot of the most useful bits of the XMPP protocol stack. It becomes clear when reading the book just how much care and thought has gone into the design of these protocols.

Specifically the chapters on instant messaging and XMPP pubsub have stood out to me.

The downside of all this is that no one warned me how much work a book review is, or perhaps I just want to be thorough. My ratio of lines of comment to pages is currently hovering around 3 to 1. It is mostly small stuff because the text is already in great shape.

Peter, Kevin, and Remko have done a wonderful job, and their hard work really shows.