An excellent next-step for students who have read Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated series, this book is designed to boost programmers to a higher level of competence by focusing on the protocol suite's more subtle features and techniques. In forty-four concise, self-contained lessons, this book offers experience-based tips, practices, and rules of thumb for learning high-performance TCP/IP programming techniques. Moreover, it shows you how to avoid many of TCP/IP's most common trouble spots. Numerous examples demonstrate essential ideas and concepts. Skeleton code and a library of common functions allow you to write applications without having to worry about routine chores.
Many C/C++ programmers know at least the basics of TCP/IP, but becoming an expert network programmer usually requires a lot of experience and sometimes hard-to-find knowledge. Written to give the intermediate or advanced developer a leg up in creating robust network applications using TCP/IP and related protocols,
Effective TCP/IP Programming offers a truly valuable review and guide to getting the most out of your networked programs that are based on this popular standard.
This book is packaged as a series of 44 tips for better TCP/IP programs, but it actually does much more. Early sections review the basics of the TCP, UDP and IP protocols, along with related standards. A winning feature here is the author's care to distinguish between the well-known BSD (for Unix) and Winsock (for Windows) versions of sockets. (By using macros and "skeleton" programs, his sample C code will run easily on either implementation.)
Besides offering nuts-and-bolts programming advice and plenty of hints for better performance, Snader also discusses how IP works under the hood. Standout sections here include a discussion of the pitfalls of scaling a stand-alone or LAN TCP/IP application to the Internet, as well as what a "reliable" protocol like TCP really means. He shows you how to handle misbehaving servers and clients, and how to use multiple sockets effectively, and he offers several useful tips for optimizing data streamed across the wire. Although he doesn't mention Java here (which offers strong socket support on its own), the author does provide Perl examples that work with sockets in order to get you started with sockets used within scripting languages.
Because IP is the protocol of choice for the Internet, more and more of us are faced with becoming socket-programming experts in a hurry. In all, Effective TCP/IP Programming offers a good mix of basic and advanced tips on today's IP and related protocols. It's a valuable resource for any developer who programs for the Internet and wants to write better code using sockets. --Richard Dragan
Topics covered: TCP/IP overview and programming tips, Berkeley Socket Distribution (BSD) vs. Winsock/Windows socket implementation issues, connected and connectionless protocols, network-programming frameworks, UDP vs. TCP, reliable protocols, network programming for single workstations, LANs and WANs; event-driven programming, improving write operations, IP packet layout, byte ordering issues, the Nagle and delayed ACK algorithms, using network utilities: inetd, tcpmux, tcpdump, traceroute, ttcp, and netstat; and resources and hints for improving network-programming skills.
