[tptacek]

Wasn't there a reason that EventMachine wasn't pure Ruby? I remember someone else trying to build an event library in Ruby, failing, and then yelling at Francis Cianfrocca that EventMachine wasn't possible to build reliably under MRI --- maybe because of greenthread timeouts? I know, this sounds like gobbledygook even to me.

I am all for new programming books, and this one might be great, and the author has a good reputation. But in case you're wondering: the native sockets API hasn't changed much since Stevens wrote Unix Network Programming (are there any major changes at all besides sendfile?); UNP is one of the all-time great programming books. Also, you are absolutely well served by pulling down EventMachine, following the examples, and just using EventMachine's abstractions instead of Ruby's socket code. We virtually never use Ruby sockets; EventMachine is better.