TCP/IP Sockets in C: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides Series)

by Morgan Kaufmann

Product Description

Review

"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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Description

For example code from the text, Winsock adaptations of text code, sample programming exercises and more,
click on the grey "COMPANION SITE" button to the right.

Note: This title was formerly known as Pocket Guide to TCP/IP Socket Programming in C, ISBN 1-55860-686-6.

TCP/IP Sockets in C: Practical Guide for Programmers 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.

*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. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000FO7WZW
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect way to get a grip on sockets!, August 12, 2002

By 

Rebecca K. "gulf coast girl" (Fort Collins, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: TCP/IP Sockets in C Bundle: TCP/IP Sockets in C: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) (Paperback)

This book is awesome. I've been writing tcp/ip sockets code for years and I've used all the standard reference books (Esp. the Stevens books) and they're great. Let me tell you, though, that I wish I had this book when I got started with TCP/IP programming. It's clear, it goes into sufficient detail to get you to understand what's going on, but not so much that you get lost.

I read in two pages of this book something that none of the other books showed, the 'pre-forking' server model which things like Apache use. None of my other books explain how this works, this does, clearly and concisely. Even though I own all the standards (TCP/IP Illustrated volumes 1, 2 and 3, and both editions of Unix Network Programming by Stevens) when I got a chance to thumb through this book (and it's sister book "TCP/IP sockets in java") I knew immediately I would be buying them.

Excellent. Just Excellent.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Basic TCP/IP Programming book, February 11, 2004

By 

Arunkumar Viswanathan (Clifton, NJ, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: TCP/IP Sockets in C Bundle: TCP/IP Sockets in C: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) (Paperback)

This book was recommended to me for one of my courses and I was very skeptical seeing the size. But after reading the book, I was extremely impressed.

If you are just into network programming, then this book teaches most of the basics needed to advance more deeply. The explanations are very good and all the code written in the book work :) If you are already familiar with the basics of TCP / IP, then you can finish this book in about a day or two.

I highly recommend this book for every network programming beginner. Please Note: This book is not a guide to C programming and you should be familiar with basic C data structures and pointers for understanding some of the code logic.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unix socket book worth the money and time!, May 15, 2004

By 

David (San Diego) - See all my reviews

This review is from: TCP/IP Sockets in C Bundle: TCP/IP Sockets in C: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Practical Guides) (Paperback)

The reviews by the Amazon reviewers "Rebecca L Kuri" and "Erick & Janet Wagner" accurately describe my thoughts on "TCP/IP Sockets in C:..". I too waded through the "W.R. Stevens" books, "Internetworking with TCP/IP" Volumes I thru III, and a few other Unix socket books but did not find one that provided as much information in as short a time as this book.

"Bob Tribit's" negative review of this book is useful to people already familiar with network programming. He provides good reasoning on using the more thorough books of "W.R. Stevens", which are very useful in their context.

If you plan to do Windows socket programming you still might want to pick this book up as an initial reference, but the Winsock2 API's and data structures are different. The Winsock APIs still have the underlying data requirements for the standard IP protocols, which is why this might still provide useful information.