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Preface

Welcome to the world of network programming with Python. Python is a
full-featured object-oriented programming language with a standard library that
includes everything needed to rapidly build powerful network applications. In
addition, it has a multitude of third-party libraries and packages that extend Python
to every sphere of network programming. Combined with the fun of using Python,
with this book, we hope to get you started on your journey so that you master these
tools and produce some great networking code.

In this book, we are squarely targeting Python 3. Although Python 3 is still
establishing itself as the successor to Python 2, version 3 is the future of the language,
and we want to demonstrate that it is ready for network programming prime time.
It offers many improvements over the previous version, many of which improve the
network programming experience, with enhanced standard library modules and
new additions.

We hope you enjoy this introduction to network programming with Python.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Network Programming and Python, introduces core networking concepts for
readers that are new to networking, and also covers how network programming is
approached in Python.

Chapter 2, HTTP and Working with the Web, introduces you to the HTTP protocol
and covers how we can retrieve and manipulate web content using Python as an
HTTP client. We also take a look at the standard library urllib and third-party
Requests modules.