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

Enhanced emails


The emails we've been looking at so far have been only simple text. Modern email usage often demands fancier formatted emails.

We can control the content type of an email using the Content-Type header. This is very similar to the content type header used by HTTP, which we covered in Chapter 7, Building a Simple Web Server.

If the content type header is missing, a content type of text/plain is assumed by default. Therefore, the Content-Type header in the following email is redundant:

From: Alice Doe <[email protected]>
To: Bob Doe <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: The Cake
Date: Fri, 03 May 2019 02:31:20 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain

Hi Bob,

Do NOT forget to bring the cake!

Best,
Alice

If you want formatting support in your email, which is common today, you should use a text/html content type. In the following email, HTML is used to add emphasis:

From: Alice Doe <[email protected]>
To: Bob Doe <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: The Cake
Date: Fri, 03 May 2019...