🌿

The unofficial
ZEF zine

~ a page-by-page book, zero to pro ~

data › code everything is a value pipes all the way down 28 chapters

a slow, friendly tour of the Zef framework.
built page by page so you can read it like a book.
turn the pages with ← → or click any chapter below.

how this book is organized

Zef is a big framework. We'll climb it like a hill — pausing often, looking back, making mental models along the way. Each chapter is one page, meant to be read in 5–12 minutes. Don't skip — the later ideas lean on the earlier ones.

Every page has:

a mental model box (the picture in your head)
plenty of examples — runnable if you have zef installed
"gotcha!", "wait what?", and "try it!" interruptions
prev / next navigation at the bottom, and keyboard arrows

🗺 Table of Contents

PART I — Foundations

what is Zef?

a one-page mental intro

the three big ideas

types, ops, FX

the pipe |

data flowing left to right

PART II — ZefOps (pure computation)

ZefOps basics

map, filter, reduce, apply

ZefOps patterns

match, rearrange, F, Z

PART III — Data & Types

Zen notation

Python literals ARE data

types are sets

is_a, refinement, Z-expr

PART IV — Graphs

declarative graph-to-tree

PART V — Effects & Functions

FX: effects as data

construct, then run

the FX catalog tour

Print, HTTP, Random, Time...

@zef_function

content-addressed handlers

PART VI — State & Persistence

databases

DictDB & ArrayDB

signals

thread-safe state with history

PART VII — Concurrency

actors 101

topics, handlers, state

actor patterns

state machines, fan-out

pub-sub & timers

Subscribe, Publish, Timer

PART VIII — Servers & Clients

HTTP servers

routes, responses, JSON

websockets

broadcast + actor-per-client

auth + HTTPS

OAuth, Let's Encrypt

PART IX — Advanced

parsing with patterns

Sequence, parse2, JSON in 25 lines

workers & isolation

processes for fault tolerance

PART X — Wrap-up

the single-page reference

how to actually run the code

If you want to try things as you read, install zef with pip install zef (or build from source as CLAUDE.md describes). Every example in this book is written for the current API. Open a Python REPL, do from zef import *, and paste away.

If you don't have zef installed — no worries. Read the pages like a picture book, let the mental models soak in, and come back later to actually run things.

The unofficialZEF zine

how this book is organized

🗺 Table of Contents

how to actually run the code

The unofficial
ZEF zine