Yeah, but as an introduction to multithreading it's awesome. You will still learn how to create threads, how to communicate with them, how to synchronise them a

Yeah, but as an introduction to multithreading it's awesome. You will still learn how to create threads, how to communicate with them, how to synchronise them and how to avoid sharing state if you use Zero MQ. None of that is abstracted. But once you've got the principles down, then you can dig deeper or do it by hand with pthreads or your OS's library if you feel the need. The main pain with learning threading is you have to wrap your head around the principles of it - which are fairly foreign - while at the same time battling with the very strange and frustrating errors because it's so easy to get wrong. ZMQ teaches you the principles without the errors after which you can go master the low level bits if you wish.