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

A first UDP client/server


To drive these points home, it will be useful to work through a full UDP client and UDP server program.

To keep things simple, we will create a UDP client program that simply sends the Hello World string to 127.0.0.1 on port 8080. Our UDP server listens on 8080. It prints any data it receives, along with the sender's address and port number.

We will begin by implementing the simple UDP server.

A simple UDP server

We will start with the server, since we already have a usable UDP client, that is, udp_client.c.

Like all of our networked programs, we will begin by including the necessary headers, starting with the main() function, and initializing Winsock as follows:

/*udp_recvfrom.c*/

#include "chap04.h"

int main() {

#if defined(_WIN32)
    WSADATA d;
    if (WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(2, 2), &d)) {
        fprintf(stderr, "Failed to initialize.\n");
        return 1;
    }
#endif

If you've been working through this book in order, this code should be very routine for you...