Thanks. I'm aware of that handbook but somehow I find web-based books lack the charm of a real book but eventually once I know my way around it, I'm sure I'll come to it.
Is there a 300-page or less book that can teach practical usage of FreeBSD? Like the C book or the UNIX programming environment book. I have it installed on one of my laptops but never got around to use it.
What about ROS? They have pubsub, services (like HTTP), actionlib (basically like a progress event) and message code generation. They also have entire suite for debugging and logging the communications (e.g. rostopic, rosservice, rosbag, etc..). They even have rosbridge_websocket if you need web apps to interact with native apps and servers. They are also building ROS 2 which might be even nicer.