it' not impossible that more recent repositories for standard protocol specifications will arise during this book' shelf lifebut the ietf website will likely be the main authority for some time to come if you do lookthoughbe warned that the details arewelldetailed because python' protocol modules hide most of the socket and messaging complexity documented in the protocol standardsyou usually don' need to memorize these documents to get web work done with python socket programming now that we've seen how sockets figure into the internet picturelet' move on to explore the tools that python provides for programming sockets with python scripts this section shows you how to use the python socket interface to perform low-level network communications in later we will instead use one of the higher-level protocol modules that hide underlying sockets python' socket interfaces can be used directlythoughto implement custom network dialogs and to access standard protocols manually as previewed in the basic socket interface in python is the standard library' socket module like the os posix modulepython' socket module is just thin wrapper (interface layerover the underlying library' socket calls like python filesit' also object-based--methods of socket object implemented by this module call out to the corresponding library' operations after data conversions for instancethe library' send and recv function calls become methods of socket objects in python python' socket module supports socket programming on any machine that supports bsd-style sockets--windowsmacslinuxunixand so on--and so provides portable socket interface in additionthis module supports all commonly used socket types--tcp/ipudpdatagramand unix domain--and can be used as both network interface api and general ipc mechanism between processes running on the same machine from functional perspectivesockets are programmer' device for transferring bytes between programspossibly running on different computers although sockets themselves transfer only byte stringswe can also transfer python objects through them by using python' pickle module because this module converts python objects such as listsdictionariesand class instances to and from byte stringsit provides the extra step needed to ship higher-level objects through sockets when required socket programming