tcp-ip

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.

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.

This book is woefully incomplete. The real world examples aren't, and as for being a practical guide for programmers it isn't. It is missing critical topics such as what is Nagle's algorithm (i.e. TCP_NODELAY) and when to use it. Helpful resolver functions such as sethostent() and endhostent() are not discussed. It includes none of the lessons learned by the apache server project (i.e. ways to handle thundering herd (accept() wakeups)).

This is a great book to make a programmer incredibly dangerous at network programming, but isn't complete enough to make them understand why if they change the examples quirky things start to happen.

Network socket programming isn't something that can be done with a glass of lemonade and a weekend with this book. Get the Steven's books, and then get Effective TCP/IP Programming which quickly tells you how to polish what you have created to something resembling a predictable "working" network application.