Beej's Guide to Network Programming

by Brian 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: Programming, Technical, Computer Science, Technology, Software, Textbooks

142 pages, Paperback

First published October 20, 2011

Reviews

[Xinyu]

While I was struggling with project 1, I blamed myself not to read it during the summer. But truth be told, even if I had read it, I would still not proceed well with project. I guess this is kind of stuff that I can only learn by doing :)

Wrote this right after I finally finished the coding part of project 1. Huge relief! I thought I was never going to make it work.

[Farsan Rashid · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic book to learn socket programming from scratch.

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a short book but it is a great one for learning the basics of Socket Programming. After reading this book, I feel pretty confident in writing a basic network program. I really loved Brian Hall's humor within the book and it kept the book entertaining which kept reading to the end while learning a bit.

[Adolfo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short, fun, and to the point. While not the most complete introduction to network programming available, it's probably one of the more accesible ones, and definitely the cheaper. A must read if you want to learn the basics of the BSD socket API.

[Elene Latsoshvili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty nice introduction to network programming. And written with humor :)

[Geoffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great introduction to reading about Computer Networks and how different aspects of the network fit together. Brian uses metaphors straight out of left field which do work, but also leave you saying "what??"

There are also some good coding examples that are useful to follow that write yourself, but be warned they are written in C/C++.

Overall, a great introduction to network programming. If you're looking to get used to LAN network programming, this is great. If not, I'm trying to get an introduction to WAN network programming too and if you find a good source on that, please let me know too.

[Patrick Coakley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I used Beej's Guide To Network Programming in a graduate operating systems course to pick up socket programming for some of the course content. While it's a short-ish book, it's one that you can refer back to quite a bit when you're first trying to understand how sockets work and how to get up and running, and so I highly recommending grabbing this book for free and using it as one of the primary resources, in addition to a strong technical reference like W. Richard Stevens Unix Network Programming.

[Lachlan Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic for good reason. This book is written such that it is equally enjoyable and informative. The best guide I've read to understanding and using sockets for network programming. An excellent reference.

[Ara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gran introducción a la programación en redes. Además lo explica con humor, un genio este tipo.

[Ahmed · Rating 4 out of 5]

good long artical about socket programming, covers network stuffes easily