Well, for starters try to find a good AMQP tutorial. There's Rabbits &#38; Warrens (which is good but still quite rough) and that's about it. Large parts of the semantics (exchange types, interactions between the various flags) are needlessly complex. Most of the same could have been achieved with <i>much</i> simpler primitives (see other protocols like spread, stomp etc.).<p>Even one of the authors in this article admits dumb decisions like making it a binary protocol and generally making it extra-ordinarily difficult to create a working protocol endpoint. What's up with this whole XML descriptor thing...<p>In summary AMQP has been the most painful protocol I had the misfortune to work with since leaving java-land. (Admittedly partly because the python drivers are especially messy)