Pocket Guide to TCP/IP Socket Programming in C (The Morgan Kaufmann Practical Guides Series) - Softcover

This book targets the accomplished C programmer who wants to learn network programming. You're assumed to have a good working knowledge of basic IP addressing and network configuration--not much time is spent educating you on the fundamentals of networking architecture.

A highlight of this book is the solid sample code. Even for those who already write socket code, a brief refresher is always helpful--this book delivers valuable client and server code for both TCP and UDP sockets. Although the samples are based on a Unix environment, it's a trivial matter to port most of the code to Microsoft Windows and the Windows Sockets interface (ported samples also are available directly from the book's Web site). No longer do you have to paw through a thick reference to find parameter lists for sendto() or accept(). More subtle issues--data alignment, network vs. host byte order, and differing approaches to handling client connections--also are handled with ease.

Chapter 6 contains an under-the-hood discussion on TCP/IP implementation that will be useful to the more advanced user and that explains possible deadlock conditions, discusses the TCP state diagram, and sheds light on how the operating system handles socket resources. These juicy nuggets are reasons enough to keep this book handy--even after the thrill of your first successful network program subsides. --Pete Ostenson

This book fills a void in the area of networking education. The presentation is easily accessible to students, with lots of code examples. It will be an excellent companion to traditional networking textbooks for use in undergraduate and introductory graduate courses.

-Ellen W. Zegura, Georgia Institute of Technology

This is the best, all-in-one socket book I have read and yet it doesn't come with the unnecessary overhead of many other books. It is loaded with very useful examples and it can be used as a socket API reference as well. In a word, it is a very well written book that has everything practitioners need.

-Steve Bernier, Communications Research Center

The Pocket Guide to TCP/IP Sockets is a quick and affordable way to gain the knowledge and skills you need to develop sophisticated and powerful networked-based programs using sockets. Written by two experienced networking instructors, this book provides a series of examples that demonstrate basic sockets techniques for clients and servers.

Using plenty of real-world examples, this book is a complete beginner's guide to socket programming and a springboard to more advanced networking topics, including multimedia protocols.

Features:

• Concise, no-nonsense explanations of issues often troublesome for beginners, including message construction and parsing.
  
• Comprehensive example-based coverage of the most important TCP/IP techniques-including iterative and concurrent servers, timeouts, and asynchronous message processing.
  
• Includes a detailed, easy-to-use reference to the system calls and auxiliary routines that comprise the sockets interface.
  
• A companion Web site provides source code for all example programs in both C and WinSock versions, as well as guidance on running the code on various platforms.