Chapter 1, Simplifying Your Network Programming in C++, explains the preparation of a C++ compiler, which will be used to compile all the source code in this book. Also, it will tell us how to compile a single source code and link to multiple source codes.

Chapter 2, Understanding the Networking Concepts, covers the network reference models, which are OSI and TCP/IP. It also provides various TCP/IP tools that we will often be using to detect whether an error has occurred in our network connection.

Chapter 3, Introducing the Boost C++ Libraries, explains how to set up the compiler in order to compile the code that contains the Boost libraries and how to build the binaries of libraries that we have to compile separately.

Chapter 4, Getting Started with Boost.Asio, talks about concurrent and nonconcurrent programming. It also discusses the I/O service, which is used to access the operating system's resources and establish communication between our program and the operating system that performs I/O requests.

Chapter 5, Delving into the Boost.Asio Library, walks us through how to serialize an I/O service's work in order to ensure that the order of work completely matches the order we have designed. It also covers how to handle errors and exceptions and create time delays in network programming.

Chapter 6, Creating a Client-server Application, discusses developing a server that is able to send and receive data traffic from a client and also how to create a client-side program to receive data traffic.

Chapter 7, Debugging the Code and Solving the Error, covers the debugging process to trace the errors that may be produced by an unexpected result, such as getting crash in the middle of a program execution. After reading this chapter, you will be able to solve various errors by debugging the code.

To walk through this book and to successfully compile all source codes, you need a personal computer that runs Microsoft Windows 8.1 (or a later version) and contains the following software:

This book is for C++ network programmers who have basic knowledge of network programming, but no knowledge of how to use Boost.Asio for network programming.

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: "Wait for a moment until the mingw-w64-install.exe file is completely downloaded."

A block of code is set as follows:

/* rangen.cpp */
#include <cstdlib>
#include <iostream>
#include <ctime>
int main(void) {

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

int guessNumber;
std::cout << "Select number among 0 to 10: ";
std::cin >> guessNumber;

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

rundll32.exe sysdm.cpl,EditEnvironmentVariables

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "You will be greeted by a Welcoming dialog box. Just press the Next button to go to the Setup Setting dialog box."

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