In today's information-centric globalized world, telecommunications have become an essential part of our lives. They penetrate and play crucial roles in almost every aspect of our day-to-day activities, from personal to professional. Sometimes, a failure to communicate information correctly and on time may lead to significant loss of material assets or even casualties.
Therefore, it is very important to provide the highest level of reliability when it comes to developing telecommunication software. However, it can be a really challenging task due to the inherent complexity of the domain and accidental complexity of the low-level tools provided by modern operating systems.
The Boost.Asio library is aimed at reducing accidental complexity by introducing type systems and exploiting object-oriented methods, and decreasing the development time by providing high degrees of reusability. In addition to this, because the library is cross-platform, the applications implemented with it can be built on multiple platforms, which enhances software qualities even more, while decreasing its costs.
This book contains more than 30 recipes—step-by-step solutions to various tasks that often (and not so often) arise in the area of network programming. All recipes take advantage of facilities provided by the Boost.Asio library, demonstrating best practices of applying the library to execute typical tasks and solve different problems.
Chapter 1, The Basics, introduces you to basic classes provided by the Boost.Asio library and demonstrates how to execute basic operations, such as resolving a DNS name, connecting a socket, accepting a connection, and so on.
Chapter 2, I/O Operations, demonstrates how to perform individual network I/O operations, both synchronous and asynchronous.
Chapter 3, Implementing Client Applications, contains recipes that demonstrate how to implement different types of client applications.
Chapter 4, Implementing Server Applications, contains recipes that demonstrate how to implement different types of server applications.
Chapter 5, HTTP and SSL/TLS, covers more advanced topics on the HTTP and SSL/TLS protocol implementation.
Chapter 6, Other Topics, includes recipes that discuss less popular but still quite important topics, such as timers, socket options, composite buffers, and others.
To compile samples presented in this book, you will need Visual Studio 2012+ on Windows or GCC 4.7+ on Unix platforms.
If you want to enhance your C++ network programming skills using the Boost.Asio library and understand the theory behind the development of distributed applications, this book is just what you need. The prerequisite for this book is to have a basic knowledge of C++11. To get the most from the book and comprehend advanced topics, you will need some background experience in multithreading.
In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).
To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:
This section tells you what to expect in the recipe, and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.
This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.
This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "In Boost.Asio a passive socket is represented by the asio::ip::tcp::acceptor class."
A block of code is set as follows:
std::shared_ptr<boost::asio::ip::tcp::socket> m_sock; boost::asio::streambuf m_request; std::map<std::string, std::string> m_request_headers; std::string m_requested_resource;
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
std::shared_ptr<boost::asio::ip::tcp::socket> m_sock;
boost::asio::streambuf m_request;
std::map<std::string, std::string> m_request_headers;
std::string m_requested_resource;New terms and important words are shown in bold.
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