*Practice building and extending Gaim, while learning GTK toolkit and network protocols
*Tutorials are based on OS Gaim project: the #1 Sourceforge project out of 86,116 present on Sourceforge
*In one 7 day period (from 8/23/04-8/30/04), it was downloaded nearly 55,000 times. Typing "gaim" into google brings up over 900,000 hits
Buy Open Source Messaging Application Development by Sean Egan from Australia's Online Independent Bookstore, BooksDirect.