I would like to suggest that we remove the socket HOWTO (currently at http://docs.python.org/dev/howto/sockets.html)
My main issue with this document is that it doesn't seem to have a well-defined destination: - people who know sockets won't learn anything from it - but people who don't know sockets will probably find it clear as mud (for example, what's an "INET" or "STREAM" socket? what's "select"?)
<snip> I definitely recall finding this document useful when I first learned Python. I knew socket programming from other languages, and the document helped to see how it maps to Python. That said, I must agree that there is probably no place for such a tutorial in Python's official documentation. Python is a widely-general purpose language, and sockets programming is just one of a plethora of things it supports, so a special treatment for sockets probably isn't warranted, especially given that the `socket` module itself is a relatively thin wrapper over the OS socket interface. I don't think a rewrite will help either. To describe socket programming in full, without missing anything and being accurate will require no less than a small book (and in fact many such books already exist). Therefore, I'm +1 on removing it from the official docs. It can be relegated to the Python wiki, where it can be improved if someone wishes to contribute to that. Eli