Book Image

Hands-On Network Programming with C

By : Lewis Van Winkle
Book Image

Hands-On Network Programming with C

By: Lewis Van Winkle

Overview of this book

Network programming enables processes to communicate with each other over a computer network, but it is a complex task that requires programming with multiple libraries and protocols. With its support for third-party libraries and structured documentation, C is an ideal language to write network programs. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, this C network programming book begins with the fundamentals of Internet Protocol, TCP, and UDP. You’ll explore client-server and peer-to-peer models for information sharing and connectivity with remote computers. The book will also cover HTTP and HTTPS for communicating between your browser and website, and delve into hostname resolution with DNS, which is crucial to the functioning of the modern web. As you advance, you’ll gain insights into asynchronous socket programming and streams, and explore debugging and error handling. Finally, you’ll study network monitoring and implement security best practices. By the end of this book, you’ll have experience of working with client-server applications and be able to implement new network programs in C. The code in this book is compatible with the older C99 version as well as the latest C18 and C++17 standards. You’ll work with robust, reliable, and secure code that is portable across operating systems, including Winsock sockets for Windows and POSIX sockets for Linux and macOS.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

What are sockets?


A socket is one endpoint of a communication link between systems. Your application sends and receives all of its network data through a socket.

There are a few different socket application programming interfaces (APIs). The first were Berkeley sockets, which were released in 1983 with 4.3BSD Unix. The Berkeley socket API was widely successful and quickly evolved into a de facto standard. From there, it was adopted as a POSIX standard with little modification. The terms Berkeley sockets, BSD sockets, Unix sockets, and Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) sockets are often used interchangeably.

If you're using Linux or macOS, then your operating system provides a proper implementation of Berkeley sockets.

Windows' socket API is called Winsock. It was created to be largely compatible with Berkeley sockets. In this book, we strive to create cross-platform code that is valid for both Berkeley sockets and Winsock.

Historically, sockets were used for inter-process communication...