This holidays I was rather keen on trying to get my head around asynchronous programming and figured the Twisted Python Framework would be a great place to start. I'm currently reading this series called "An Introduction to Asynchronous Programming and Twisted" which is great for introducing concepts like the Reactor Pattern, Callbacks, Deferred and Non-blocking I/O.

I take my hat off to you. I’ve never been able to comprehend that.

Callbacks make debugging hard :(

Python and gobject is reasonably straightforward, given that you understand event loops. Otherwise there's greenlets or indeed there is twisted. Choose wisely!

+Jonathan Newnham That's one of the things I've liked about  Twisted: it provides a number of abstractions and flow-control tools rather than just relying on adding callbacks to every function. Curious to see if it helps or if it's still horrible.

+Tyson Clugg I haven't tried out gobject yet, but I plan on also taking a look at that. I really want to get my head around good event loops, so I get a better understanding of using them for C/C++. The ad-hoc threads and timeout approach seems to get very messy once you're beyond a few event sources.