Sockets modules

Network sockets is a way to talk to other computers using standard Unix file descriptors, which allow communication between two different processes on the same or different machines. A socket is almost similar to a low-level file descriptor, because commands such as read() and write() also work with sockets as they do with files.

Python has two basic sockets modules:

• Socket: The standard BSD sockets API.

• SocketServer: A server-centric module that defines classes for handling synchronous network requests that simplify the development of network servers.

Socket

The socket module has almost everything you need to build a socket server or client. In the case of Python, the socket returns an object to which the socket methods can be applied.

Methods in socket module

The socket module has the following class methods:

• socket.socket(family, type): Create and return a new socket object
• socket.getfqdn(name): Convert a string IP address to a fully qualified domain name
• socket.gethostbyname...