It's not that it would be counterproductive; it's simply impenetrable. I read libev's awful homepage and perused the epoll manpage, but they don't mean anythin

It's not that it would be counterproductive; it's simply impenetrable. I read libev's awful homepage and perused the epoll manpage, but they don't mean anything to me--I don't have enough context for them to sink in. (Also... and I say this understanding that I am a man filled with ignorance and hubris... how relevant can libev really be, if its canonical source repo is still maintained with cvs?) But, manpages are rarely where one goes to begin learning about something... on the very first section, I am already inundated with things that mean nothing to me: what are "edge-triggered" and "level-triggered?" What does it mean to "watch" a file descriptor? I know just enough about GNU/Linux I/O to be dangerous, so I can start to build an inkling of understanding based on this information: "watching" a file descriptor is probably how we register event listeners, and "edge vs. level" is most likely a decision about when handlers receive their data. But that's about as far as I can get before I have to start descending into the terms I don't completely understand. When I find something that explains those, it will probably rely on a bunch of other terms that I must descend into, and so forth. By the time I finally recurse all the way back up to my original quest for knowledge ("What does event-driven mean?"), I will be so inundated with new information that nothing sticks! Thanks for the suggestion about Twisted, EM and Node.js... I'll have to make some time to play with them soon.