Yeah the book has you do web server stuff which I did find useful for learning async a bit although I think in practice most people use crates like tokio rather than implement their own parallelization. I would def recommend graphics for a project though. Its fun because the results of your work are very visual of course lol and it kinda exercises all of the skills youre learning depending on how much you get into it and try to optimize.
It took me like 4 hours to figure out what this meant lol <3