This book is edited by Li Hui and Chen Yanyan, with associate editors Yang Yu, Gao Yong, Zhang Qiaosheng, Bi Ye, and Liu Dengzhi. It is rich in content, covering 32 theories and 32 practical cases, ...

How would I convert that to an actual num? If I use int (), Python assumes decimal and creates a number that's much, much bigger (in the above example, it would return the # 101101 instead of 45).

The only time to pickle something is if you need to represent a non-string object on disk, but Python code is strings. I presume that the receiving program is basically calling eval (skt.recv ()).