<snip> > Yes, these are all excellent concepts to be familiar with. But the word > "socket" (and the socket HOWTO) refers to a specific way to interface with > those concepts, the Berkeley socket API: > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_sockets>. Which you don't have to > know anything about if you're going to use Twisted. You should know about > IPC in general, and TCP/UDP specifically if you're going to use Twisted, but > sockets are completely optional. > Also, I feel that I should point out that the sockets HOWTO does not cover > even a single one of these concepts in any useful depth. If you think that > these are what it should be explaining, it needs some heavy editing. Here's > what it has to say about each one: > > what is a TCP connection? > > The only place that the characters "TCP" appear in the entire document is in > the phrase "... which is completely different from TCP_NODELAY ...". > Nowhere is a TCP connection explained at a conceptual level, except to say > that it's something a web browser does. > > how is UDP different from TCP? > > The phrase "UDP" never appears in the HOWTO. DGRAM sockets get a brief > mention as "anything else" in the sentence: "... you’ll get better behavior > and performance from a STREAM socket than anything else ...". (To be fair, > I do endorse teaching that "the difference between TCP and UDP is that you > should not use UDP" to anyone not sufficiently advanced to read the relevant > reference documentation themselves.) > > when data arrives, what layers of software does it go through? > > There's no discussion of this that I can find at all. > > what is a port number? > > Aside from a few comments in the code examples, the only discussion of port > numbers is "low number ports are usually reserved for “well known” services > (HTTP, SNMP etc)." > It would be very good to have a "Python networking overview" somewhere that > explained this stuff at a very high level, and described how data might get > into or out of your program, with links to things like the socket HOWTO that > describe more specific techniques. This would be useful because most <snip>
Just be careful not to reproduce http://www.apress.com/9781590593714 :-) These things tend to get out of hand very quickly. Eli _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
