This final chapter includes four recipes that stand somewhat apart from those in previous chapters that demonstrate the core Boost.Asio concepts, covering the majority of typical use cases. However, it does not mean that recipes demonstrated in this chapter are less important. On the contrary, they are very important and even critical to specific cases. However, they will be required less often in typical distributed applications.

Though most applications will not require scatter/gather I/O operations and composite buffers, for some, which keep different parts of messages in separate buffers, such facilities may turn out to be very usable and convenient.

The Boost.Asio timer is a powerful instrument that allows measuring time intervals. Often, this is used to set deadlines for the operations that may last unpredictably long and to interrupt those operations if they do not complete after running for a certain period of time. For many distributed applications, such an instrument...