tcp-ip

This book provides an excellent insight into TCP/IP programming. The concepts are presented in a system independent manner as much as possible. The focus of the book is to teach TCP/IP programming concepts and not to teach how to program in WINDOWS, so readers who are not competent in Windows programming may need another reference to help them out there. I have not found another book that so clearly outlines the considerations that must be made in order to design an effective and robust TCP/IP interface. A list of some of the points that I found very helpful are:
1) Why to use TCP instead of UDP except for very specific circumstances.
2) TCP is a STREAM protocol with no inherent notion of message or message boundary.
3) Why to combine data into larger writes instead of many small writes.
4) A discussion of avoiding movement of data with Shared Memory.

Every book has target, and that's important for rating books.
As an intermediate programmer(my major was Computer Science but I don't have much experience in real field yet. I admit it.), this book was a great help to me. I have read Mr.Comer's "Internetworking with TCP/IP" and Mr.Steven's "Unix Network Programming". Definitely, those books are good references. But usually, readers of those big books can miss some important points.
While reading this book, I got back to those books and re-read many pages which I have missed their real meaning. So, that's the virtue of this book. This book is quite concise and clear about Network features(especially TCP/IP) which can be easily overlooked.

Author said he would deal with both UNIX(LINUX) and Windows platform, but he didn't follow his promise well. This book is quite concentrated for Unix, but that's not so serious defect. A great deal of this book's technics are quite helpful regardless which platform you work.

This book has a perfect balance of brevity and depth. Anything shorter would have been superficial, anything deeper would begin to compete with Stevens' Unix Network Programming (and lose). As is, this book fits very well for developers who do occasional TCP/IP development, but still need to develop reliable, industrial-grade software.