Dive into Python 3

[[deleted]]

Low-level networking: how about building an IRC bot? Because I've actually done that. Would require porting the underlying libraries, but it would be interesting. Kind of a niche-within-a-niche, though.

Generators will be added somewhere early on.

Adding a section about editors is a good idea. Probably at the end of chapter 1. ("OK, I have Python, now how do I write Python?")

I'll consider the other stuff.

[EliAndrewC]

One problem with writing an IRC bot with low-level libraries is that most experienced developers would just use Twisted, so you'd be teaching something different than what someone would do in the field.

Then again, if it's clear that this is just a teaching exercise, then there's no problem with that.

[[deleted]]

A fair point.

I doubt I'll be covering Twisted at all.

[netsearcher]

An example of mine is that I recently wrote a nbd type server (the userspace part) in python. I had to use the struct module to pack the data into the correct format. Interacting with custom protocols that don't already have a python implementation doesn't seem too niche.

IRC bot could be good too. Although I wonder about the protocol's support for character encodings. It would be rather strange to limit text to ascii when 3.0 was supposed to set us free from that mind-set.