Introduction

This book is for people who want to write programs that communicate with each other using an application program interface (API) known as sockets. Some readers may be very familiar with sockets already, as that model has become synonymous with network programming. Others may need an introduction to sockets from the ground up. The goal of this book is to offer guidance on network programming for beginners as well as professionals, for those developing new network-aware applications as well as those maintaining existing code, and for people who simply want to understand how the networking components of their system function.

All the examples in this text are actual, runnable code tested on Unix systems. However, many non-Unix systems support the sockets API and the examples are largely operating system-independent, as are the general concepts we present. Virtually every operating system (OS) provides numerous network-aware applications such as Web browsers, email clients, and file-sharing servers. We discuss the usual partitioning of these applications into client and server and write our own small examples of these many times throughout the text.

Presenting this material in a Unix-oriented fashion has the natural side effect of providing background on Unix itself, and on TCP/IP as well. Where more extensive background may be interesting, we refer the reader to other texts. Four texts are so commonly mentioned in this book that we've assigned them the following abbreviations:

• APUE: Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment [Stevens 1992]

• TCPv1: TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1 [Stevens 1994]

• TCPv2: TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 [Wright and Stevens 1995]

• TCPv3: TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3 [Stevens 1996]

TCPv2 contains a high level of detail very closely related to the material in this book, as it describes and presents the actual 4.4BSD implementation of the network programming functions for the sockets API (socket, bind, connect, and so on). If one understands the implementation of a feature, the use of that feature in an application makes more sense.