Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I loved this book!

I bought this book not knowing anything about sockets. All I knew was that I had to use them for my next project. I bought this book, and within 2 weeks time had developed a full-scale proof-of-concept, distributed, client-server type application communicating over TCP/IP and using UDP for multicasting.

The examples are concise and practical, including examples of data framing/parsing and how to deal with different wire formats (big/little endian).

This book is a must-have for any serious C# programmer.

TCP/IP Sockets in C# delivers an incredible amount of knowledge considering it is only 175 pages! The authors spend the first chapter looking at TCP and UDP protocols, their differences and benefits. By chapter two you are already experimenting with sockets.

The authors go over the TcpClient/TcpListener classes, as well as the more low-level raw socket class. The book is extremely easy to read, and is moist with interesting examples. They also cover asynchronous I/O, handling multiple connections, retrieving EndPoint information about the connecting sockets (IP Address, host info, etc..). Then FINALLY in the middle of the book they did a marvelous job of explaining byte ordering, encoding, threading, etc...

I was happy to find that we are freely able to use the raw socket classes just as we did with the Winsock 2 API. I would definetly recommend this book to C# novices, and experts who want to learn about TCP/IP sockets. This book does not teach the C# language, however, even if you're not 100% sure about the C# language, the authors don't really use advanced programming techniques to confuse you. Face it, socket programming is one of the easiest things you'll ever do!! FIVE STARS!!!!

Only a 170 pages but right on target. I like books like this one who simply focus on what the title claims to deal with. This book deals with Socket Programming in C# in a pretty complete way. Instead of repeating the MSDN library information adn the online help of the .Net frameowrk, it covers very specific issues related to socket programming and shows how the C# and the .Net framework deal with them.

I would have given a 5 stars if the book included a complete application that demonstrates the concepts and design patterns discussed in the book.

This book delivers a good understanding of sockets. I have read one or two other books regarding the subject. The thing I like about this one is A) the whole book is dedicated to it. B) Its explanations are probably the best I have read regarding any topic in programming. Remember first starting C++, and the first chapters of the book taught you how to add integers? You kind of sit there saying "Yeah, Yeah, get on with the hard stuff". As a total compliment: That is how this books makes you feel about sockets! The explanations and examples almost make it impossible to believe it is really that simple.

This book teaches TCP Socket programming using C# in a very efficient step-by-step manner.
Unlike many other books on .NET that I have, this one does not just give you code samples and leave you to scratch your head trying to figure out what's going on there. Instead, it analyzes all code samples line-by-line, leaving you virtually no questions to ask.

I gave this book 4 stars only because I was particularly interested in using multithreading with sockets for the project I'm working on, and this book's chapter on threading is surprisingly weak.

Other than that, it's a great manual to start with if you need to learn how to write socket apps in .NET.

This book gets very high ratings on both amazon.co.uk and amazon.com. I've given it a slightly lower rating than some, although still four stars, and will explain why...

The subtitle on the cover of the book is "Practical Guide for Programmers" which suggests it is going to be good even for experienced developers. It is only when you read the preface (page X) that you find that the book is aimed "primarily at students", and even then is "intended as a supplement, to be used with a traditional textbook", which seems a bit of a contradiction when it then says that "we have tried to make the book reasonably self-contained".

Anyway, what are the good points of this book? Well, it does mention most of the bits that a developer using sockets will want to consider. It has everything from blocking sockets, through non-blocking sockets and the select model, through to overlapped I/O. It also mentions threading, the use of thread pools, broadcast and multicast. All good stuff. Even includes example code for each.

Where the book falls down is that having skimmed over all of those topics it (a) doesn't provide adequate information about how to choose the model (synch vs. asynch, blocking vs. non-blocking, 1 thread vs. fixed number (> 1) of threads vs. thread pool, etc) to use for a particular project, and (b) falls short of being self-contained, doing the blah-blah is beyond the scope of this book thing.

I have seen many projects developed using the wrong model, resulting in poor performance, lack of responsiveness, inability to shutdown cleanly etc. I'm pretty sure that the authors of the book will have seen projects like that too. Books about using sockets really need to advise on this area.

It is understandable that a book of this size and price will say that some things are outside the scope of the book, but not something as basic as socket options (p52 refers the reader to the MSDN). Again, socket options are an area where well-meaning developers or support staff set values that are little better than guesses, and which sometimes cause adverse effects. If there's going to be a second edition of this book, please include advice on such matters.

So, all in all, good for students or people new to sockets, but not quite great. It tells you the basic techniques, but not how to use them to best advantage. Having said that, I prefer this book to C# Network Programming which rambles, uses language that is ambiguous in places, and contains a significant error (if being very generous, it could be very lazy English causing an unintended meaning) on the very page I opened it on.

It's probably best for people who already know sockets really well, but who are switching from one language to another (e.g. C++ or Java to C#). Those people probably know what model and options to use, just need to see how to do it in C# - something the book does do well.

C# comes with some classes that greatly alleviate a lot of low level issues in using TCP/IP sockets. You can contrast this book with the classic text by Comer and Stevens from the early 90s. The latter used a lot of grubby C code. But now in C#, you have such things as TcpListener to listen for incoming connections. Then, when a connection is established, you can improve performance with buffering by using BufferedStream.

And internationalisation is a reality nowadays. Thus, various Reader and Writer classes let you use different encodings in a simple manner. Goes far beyond being restricted to simple ASCII.

I've read through the first couple of chapters and I must say this is a good book. The thing I like most about this book is that the authors take time to not only give you working code but explain what the heck blocks within the programs do. If you are a novice programmer you may want to pick up a different book because it does assume you have a good understanding of basic C# programming.

A little big book. I expected the book to be more expert-oriented (there are lot of books around talking about TCP that a beginner can read). In any case it targets expert audience too and has a good reference for TCP/IP stacks options.
I would have preferred to find more information on parsing techniques, framing/defaming etc (too few pages perhaps?) but definetly it is a good book.

I have modest experience with sockets programming. Generally I've been able to take advantage of frameworks provided for me. However, I've recently been called upon to do performance comparisons between .NET Remoting, Windows Communication Foundation (wCF), and raw .NET sockets.

With this book I was able to get up and running very quickly. I had a real-world problem and I was able to solve it easily with this book. That single solution makes it worth the price when one hour of time can [...].

For a book such as this that is the highest praise I can give.

In a larger sense, I think the brevity of this book makes it terrific place to start.