The Art of Doing: Python Network Applications with Sockets!

Create an online multiplayer game, AOL style chat room, and more! Learn the socket, threading, json, Pygame modules!

What you'll learn:
Networking Fundaments such as IP and port addresses, IPV4, TCP, and UDP protocols.
How to set up your own home network with static IP addresses and port forwarding so anyone can connect to your programs over the internet.
How to use the socket module to create a basic two way chat in the terminal.
How to use the threading module to create a basic chat room in the terminal.
How to use tkinter module to make a GUI chat room like the old AOL chat rooms.
How to use the Json module to create an advanced GUI chat room with and admin window.
How to use the Pygame module to make your own online multiplayer game.

Requirements:
Students should have a working knowledge of Python and fundamental programming principles
Students should be comfortable with functional programming and object oriented programming as the course will utilize both towards the second half.
Familiarity with various python modules will be beneficial but I will take the time to teach what you need to know to build the programs in this course.

Description:
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. 

Who this course is for:
I would consider this to be an intermediate course for those who have a firm understanding of python basics and are looking for ways to create new and exciting projects using various python modules.
Anyone who is interested in learning how to write programs that can work over a network and communicate with one another.
Anyone who likes online multiplayer GAMES!!!

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