Beej's Guide to Network Programming

by Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall

Beej's Guide to Network Programming has been one of the top socket programming guides on the Internet for the last 15 years, and it's now for the first time available as a lovingly bound paperback book! The Guide is designed to irreverently ease your first steps into Internet Sockets programming in C. Starting from the ground up, it provides complete examples of simple clients and servers supporting both IPv6 and IPv4. Once you get through the tutorial section of the book, Part Two contains a handy-dandy reference section which helps prevent the book from becoming simple dead weight on your shelf once you've devoured it. The book focuses on the C programming language in Unix-like environments, but Windows users can still glean relevant information from its pages. Also, once you understand socket programming in C, you'll much more easily understand it in many other languages as well.

Genres: Computer Science, Programming, Technology, Nonfiction, Computers

142 pages, Paperback

Published October 21, 2011

Reviews

[Quinn Dougherty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Big recommend. Fast, light, and packed with knowledge. I might read again.

[snpefk]

For some reason, I was expecting a deeper dive into UNIX sockets, but instead I got a tiptoe-level introduction to sockets (Stream Sockets vs Datagram Sockets), a shallow rehash of Networking 101 and C programming workshop. Did I mention the humor straight out of "The Big Bang Theory"?

Because I’m a stubborn fool, I read it from the very beginning all the way to the man-pages chapter (which is about half of the "book"). I don’t think I’m qualified to truly and objectively judge the C workshop part, but this is MY BLOG, so I can bitching about whatever I want.

I didn’t enjoy reading this, except for the part where the "guide" finally reveals some mystery around the `poll` system call. I’d heard about it back in high school but never actually needed it, so I never bothered to read the docs. No mention of `epoll` though.

[Dmitry Demidov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Отличное введение в сетевое программирование. Можно прочитать за один вечер и начать писать простые программы, также полезно в качестве подготовки к собеседованию или просто справочника.
Но нужно помнить, что это именно введение - здесь освещены только базовые темы и код примеров не всегда production-ready.

[Joseph Jojoe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great introduction to network programming that does not presume too much prior experience with C. Pairs well with Beej's Guide to Unix Interprocess Communication if you are interested in utilizing sockets for intra-device communication between processes.

[Nikolay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great read and very helpful even for a beginner like me.

[Do Tuan Hoang · Rating 4 out of 5]

funny as hell, and he even promised an IP address for my puppy.

[Jia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concise and useful. I also like the jokes and sarcasm. In addition, the author made it free for the online version, hence 5 stars.

[robodoge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Was pretty cool, didn't feel like it was super useful in actual implementation though, might be because I just don't get it yet.

[Max · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is seriously a must read for anyone looking to learn about the fundamentals of network programming. By focusing the on the Unix C BSD sockets interface, it gives you a very portable understanding of networking programming.

On top of being very well written and informative, it's probably the funniest software book I've ever read. This book is available for free from Beej himself and I had read it years before purchasing it physically but this is a must read.

[Mark Lacanilao · Rating 3 out of 5]

Useful content, just not organized in the best way. Everyone in my graduate-level OS course jerks off to this book so that's gotta count for something.