Shouldn't the first step be install http://www.zeromq.org/? That is some seriously amazing stuff right there. Makes network programming (something I've avoided for years) almost trivial.
I agree and disagree. It definitely is fun to write awesome complex code, in general, but I'm currently in the middle of developing a network application and the most frustrating part was the socket handling. Everything riding on top of these connections was fun, but actually working out the TCP logic was un-fun.
That said, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, I'm sure you're not the only one to love TCP coding, and I'm glad you guys exist to write tutorials for people like me :)
On the other hand, it taught me about perverted networking standards like 802.1Q which is more common than you'd expect, and helps when you're trying to figure out why tcpdump isn't returning results you expected.
At some point you have to admit you've climbed down enough turtles and it's time to get some shit done. I'm claiming ZeroMQ is far enough down. It's not that much abstraction. It's mostly avoiding you the annoyances and giving you framework of best practices.
You also don't have a clue what it's doing or why, which means you don't have a clue what your program is doing or why. In general it's thought of as a good idea to understand these things.
At the very least learn the tcp/ip stack and why all of the complex things are the way they are. Learn why building a long-distance fault-tolerant fast reliable network protocol is hard. Learn why there's many things that can cause your application to fail to just connect to a remote host. Heck, just learn the differences in different operating systems' tcp/ip stacks and why they are that way. Just using the same framework everywhere isn't going to solve all your problems for you.
I also hear good things about Gevent, which is similar, though not nearly as well-documented. Or just use vanilla Python; sometimes it's all you need.