The Art of Doing: Python Network Applications with Sockets!

Have you ever wanted to build your own online multiplayer game that you and your friends could play?  How about wanting to build your own chat room like the golden AOL chat rooms from the 1990’s that you and your friends could “hang out” it.  Want to learn the underlying principles of how programs like these work – how they can communicate and send data back and forth from one computer to the next over the internet?  If the answer is yes, then please consider taking this course!

I know in my own journey with Python and computer science, once I got past the basics…the fundamentals…the whole “this is a for loop.  Can you print the first 100 even numbers?” type exercises, the doors really opened up.  There was only one problem:  the doors opened up to a HUGE space, with very little guidance.  Python is great because you can do so much with it, especially when you start to bring in new modules and libraries that give added functionality.  While there are ample beginner resources out there willing to hold your hand and guide you through the learning, I felt there were significantly less targeting this intermediate audience…The audience that has learned the basics and are now looking for something more…

In this course, I decided to focus my intermediate projects around networking applications; I wanted to write programs that could talk to each other online, both across my local area network and across the internet as a whole.  With this in mind, I asked myself what are some fun and engaging projects students would enjoy learning with and what external modules and libraries should we know to accomplish these projects.   In this course we will complete the following:

• A two-way terminal based chat introducing the socket module
• A terminal based chat room introducing the threading module
• A GUI chat room introducing the Tkinter module
• How to configure your router to allow communication from an external network
• An advanced GUI chat room with admin window introducing the json/pickle modules
• An online multiplayer game introducing the Pygame module

Each project builds on the knowledge gained during the previous projects.  In our culminating project, when we attempt to create our own online multiplayer game, we will be generating IPV4/TCP sockets to connect computers to a server running on a machine with a static IP and port forwarding enabled, creating various threads to run processes concurrently on our machines, we’ll use json to serialize python objects such as our game state and game players, and have a full interactive GUI interface using Pygame.

By the end of this course you will have multiple projects you can share with friends or family, have them run a client script from their house, connect to your server script, and show off all you learned.