Looking for today's Connections answer for puzzle #417 from August 1, a little less challenging than yesterday's answer, this puzzle from Connections Companion has a difficulty rating of 3.1 out of 5.

We update our Connections clues and hints daily. And if the hints aren't enough, see the four answers below, along with the category title and related words. In addition, for those of you reading this in a different time zone, I have included a reflection on yesterday's puzzle #416.

There are spoilers for connection #417. Only those who want to know the answer to today's connection should read on.

Alternatively, see our NYT Connections How to Play Guide for tips on how to solve the puzzle without our help.

While today's wordle solution guide recommends the best wordle starting words as a strategy, the Connections solution depends on identifying the categories that are connected from the 16 words. The difficulty of each category is represented by a color, with yellow being the easiest grouping and purple the most difficult. Hints are helpful as the answer is displayed after four wrong guesses.

If you need a hint to solve the groupings, here are each theme in order of difficulty:

If you read these hints, you should at least find the answer to today's connection. If not, please continue reading for larger hints. Also, if you only want to know the answer, scroll down further.

Here's a bigger clue: think of the kind of foot cover you'll find while browsing at your local friendly literary store, perhaps tossing in a novel by a recently disgraced novelist.

Now, what's the answer to today's connection in game 417?

Drum roll, please.

When I knock out the yellow first, I always try to solve straight through the sequence. That didn't happen today, but oh well.

These days everyone and everything is a brand that needs promotion, so it's easy to hype, market, sell, and pitch.

While finishing the yellow, I was already looking ahead to Cast, Chuck, Fling, and Haar, so the green fell right after that.

I'm not sure I looked at the type of socks before I looked at the bookstore's genres. Still, as soon as I saw ankle and crew, I immediately thought "socks" and quickly found sweatshirts and tubes.

The bookstore section was a nice little end to the day, with fiction, humor, romance, and travel.

Are you reading this in a slower time zone? According to Connections Companion, the difficulty rating was 3.6 out of 5. [Husky, Bulldog, Pointer. And I spent more time than I care to admit racking my brain for breeds I couldn't remember.

Then I mastered the blue category perfectly, with ambers, porters, sours, and stouts. I am an ale aficionado and a very amateur brewer, so knocking out these categories was fun.

I knocked out the yellow and green categories almost simultaneously. After I finally passed up the dog category, I heard gruff, coarse, husky, rough and raspy. My fingers seemed to pop out as I was putting in the word yellow, and Little, Middle, Pointer, and Ring were immediate hits. I was somewhat surprised that it was green and seemed harder than yellow. Would it have been easier to replace one of these with an index?

Purple was a fun little category, though I filled it in by rote today. If I hadn't spent so much time on the Fake Dogs category, I might have come across it sooner.

That said, I don't know why this category is more difficult than it was yesterday. Perhaps if you don't know what kind of beer you're drinking, you'll probably get a little tripped up.