Book Image

Python Network Programming Cookbook

By : Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker
Book Image

Python Network Programming Cookbook

By: Dr. M. O. Faruque Sarker

Overview of this book

<p>Python is an excellent language to use to write code and have fun by prototyping applications quickly. The presence of lots of third-party libraries, also known as batteries, makes it even more easier and faster to prototype an application or to implement a new algorithm. If you are interested in creating the building blocks for many practical web and networking applications that rely on networking protocols then this book is a must-have.<br /><br />This book highlights major aspects of network programming in Python starting from writing simple networking clients, to developing complex screen-scraping and network security monitoring scripts. It creates the building blocks for many practical web and networking applications that rely on various networking protocols. This book presents the power and beauty of Python in solving the numerous real-world tasks in the area of network programming, system and network administration, network monitoring, and web-application development. <br /><br />This book develops your ability to solve a wide range of network programming tasks in Python. We will start by exploring the Python standard library functions to create client/server network and manipulate your local networking resources available under both IPv4 and IPv6. The practical focus continues with creating web and email clients, scraping web pages, fetching information from various websites, and searching for information on the Web such as Amazon, Flickr, and other sites. It further develops your skills to analyze your network security vulnerabilities using advanced network packet capture and analysis techniques.</p>
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Python Network Programming Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


This chapter focuses on improving the socket server performance using a few useful techniques. Unlike the previous chapter, here we consider multiple clients that will be connected to the server and the communication can be asynchronous. The server does not need to process the request from clients in a blocking manner, this can be done independent of each other. If one client takes more time to receive or process data, the server does not need to wait for that. It can talk to other clients using separate threads or processes.

In this chapter, we will also explore the select module that provides the platform-specific I/O monitoring functions. This module is built on top of the select system call of the underlying operating system's kernel. For Linux, the manual page is located at http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/select.2.html and can be checked to see the available features of this system call. Since our socket server would like to interact with many clients, select can be...