although exists, read() method isn't reported in the SSLSocket documentation. Please, fix it

That's because SSLSocket is a wrapper around a regular socket, and the read method is documented in the Socket documentation.  You will notice that *only* SSL specific methods are documented in the SSLSocket documentation.

Oops.  My mistake.  It's been too long since I did any socket programming :(

Hmm, yeah, this is actually intended. The read() and write() methods on SSLSocket are not intended to be a public API: you should call send() or recv() instead.

Ideally we would deprecate the read() and write() methods and rename the internal helpers to _read() and _write(). Christian, what do you think?

Sounds good, let's deprecate them with #28022.

In the meantime, full documentation for the read() and write() methods was added for Python 3 in revision 61e52fda1006. The Python 2 documentation only mentions read() indirectly, in passing and in example code, and does not mention write().

But deprecating them makes sense to me. The essential functionality seems to already be available in the recv(), recv_into(), and send() or sendall() methods. The write() documentation is not clear regarding partial writes, in constrast with send() and sendall().

I'll deprecate read() and write() in my upcoming PEP.