[Edu-sig] Network Simulations using Python

[Michael H. Goldwasser]

On Wednesday September 10, 2008, David MacQuigg wrote: 

>    It occurs to me that Python would be a much better tool for what we are doing.  The objects in a network are easily modeled as Python objects, and students gain a much better understanding when they see what is inside the objects, rather than just picking them off a menu, and using them as black boxes.

Dave brings up this great idea about using Python to develop network
simulators.  A related issue is that it is possible to use Python in a
networks course for manipulating the actual network components
(e.g. sockets, pipes, clients, servers).   It certainly is easier to
do that type of programming with Python's libraries when compared to
the traditional approach done in C.

At first glance I see a couple of nice tutorials to this end in
academia targeting upper-level networks courses:

    http://ilab.cs.byu.edu/python
    http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/Python/PyNet.pdf

In fact network programming in Python is so easy we've done units on
it at the CS1 level. A discussion of our approach appeared at ITICSE
2007 in a paper titled "Introducing Network Programming into a CS1
Course." 

That paper can be downloaded at  http://cs.slu.edu/~goldwasser/publications
and more complete teaching materials from that unit appear in Chapter 14
of our text.

With regard,
Michael



       +-----------------------------------------------
       | Michael Goldwasser
       | Associate Professor
       | Dept. Mathematics and Computer Science
       | Saint Louis University
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