Hi, I'd like to announce the availability of my latest book, Foundations of Python Network Programming, published by APress. Magnus Lie Hetland (author of Practical Python) was the technical reviewer and Jason Gilmore (author of A Programmer's Introduction to PHP 4.0) was the lead editor for this book. Foundations of Python Network Programming is designed to show you everything from fundamentals of networking and low-level protocol design to work with higher-level protocols such as IMAP, HTTP, and FTP. This is not a basic reference like Python comes with. Rather, it's a hands-on guide. There are over 6600 lines of example code and the text strives to show you the big picture. For instance, there are several different ways of getting directory information from an FTP server, and some are not documented for use this way. The chapter on FTP explains them and provides example code to illustrate. There's also an APress page with details (link below). The book is split into six parts: * Part I covers low-level networking. It starts out with the basic concepts of TCP/IP networking, then explains how to use sockets to write your own protocols or implement new protocols from scratch. In addition to basic TCP/IP client and server code, topics such as UDP, exception handling, forward and reverse DNS lookups, broadcast packets, half-open sockets, and IPv6 are covered. * Part II covers web services. It starts with the coverage of HTTP client support and goes on to cover HTML parsing, XML parsing and generation, and XML-RPC. * Part III covers e-mail. It first shows you how to build plain or MIME messages and how to process and decode those messages. The MIME coverage is quite extensive, covering things like multipart messages, attachments, varying character sets in headers, etc. The remaining chapters in the e-mail part cover SMTP client communication, POP3, and IMAP. The IMAP section covers the IMAP client library included with Twisted. * Part IV covers other client-side modules, including FTP, database clients (DB-API), and concludes with a discussion of SSL/TLS. That discussion covers both sock.ssl() and PyOpenSSL and documents authentication of the remote. * Part V covers server-side frameworks. These include SocketServer and its derivatives such as SimpleXMLRPCServer, CGI. In addition, there is a chapter on mod_python. It features re-implementations of the examples from the CGI chapter for a native mod_python implementation to make it easy to see how code is different when writing mod_python as opposed to CGI. * Finally, part VI covers multitasking with an emphasis on server design but including coverage of client design. The major topics covered include forking, threading, and single-process design using poll() or the Twisted infrastructure. For more information: Table of Contents, Cover images, letter, and links to pages at Amazon, bn, etc: http://www.complete.org/pynet APress book page (including sample code downloads): http://www.apress.com/book/bookDisplay.html?bID=363 Sample chapter: http://www.apress.com/book/supplementDownload.html?bID=363&sID=2077 ISBN: 1590593715 As usual, I welcome your e-mails and comments. <P> <A HREF="http://www.complete.org/pynet">Foundations of Python Network Programming</A> - new book covering networking in Python. (14-Sep-04)