I think 0MQ is brilliant. If this is your first time looking at 0MQ, I'd suggest the following:

http://www.zeromq.org/intro:read-the-manual

Watch the first video by Ian Barber. He's an excellent presenter.

The guide ( http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all ) is very lengthy and comprehensive, but the "hello world" example and the "Divide and Conquer" example (fan out jobs, work, fan in results) will get you up and running and start showing you a sliver of the amazing power of 0MQ.

They've even got a lot of their examples in many languages:

C++ | C# | Clojure | CL | Erlang | F# | Haskell | Haxe | Java | Lua | Node.js | Perl | PHP | Python | Ruby | Scala | Ada | Basic | Go | Objective-C | ooc