Effective TCP/IP Programming: 44 Tips to Improve Your Network Programs by Jon C. Snader

From Barnes & Noble

The 44 "mini-lessons" in this book will help network developers identify the key obstacles and bottlenecks that affect TCP/IP programs -- and help them arrive at "best practices" solutions. Jon Snader demystifies TCP/IP with detailed, carefully annotated C examples designed to help you maximize performance, reliability, efficiency, and maintainability.

From the Publisher

Programming in TCP/IP can seem deceptively simple. Nonetheless, many network programmers recognize that their applications could be much more robust. Effective TCP/IP Programming is designed to boost programmers to a higher level of competence by focusing on the protocol suite's more subtle features and techniques. It gives you the know-how you need to produce highly effective TCP/IP programs.

• Exploring IP addressing, subnets, and CIDR
• Preferring the sockets interface over XTI/TLI
• Using two TCP connections
• Making your applications event-driven
• Using one large write instead of multiple small writes
• Avoiding data copying
• Understanding what TCP reliability really means
• Recognizing the effects of buffer sizes
• Using tcpdump, traceroute, netstat, and ping effectively

Booknews

A guide for experienced programmers to the protocol suite's more subtle features and techniques. Self-contained lessons offer tips, practices, and rules of thumb for learning high-performance TCP/IP programming techniques, and show how to avoid common problems. Numerous examples demonstrate essential concepts. Skeleton code and a library of common functions allow programmers to write applications without worrying about routine chores. Snader is a software engineer and a TCP/IP expert. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Forewords & Introductions

Table of Contents

Forewords & Introductions

Often, however, after an initial surge of productivity, neophytes begin to bog down in details and find that their applications suffer from performance or robustness problems. Network programming is a field full of dark corners and often misunderstood details. This book sheds light into those corners and helps replace misunderstanding with an appreciation for the often subtle points of TCP/IP programming.

After finishing this book, you should have a thorough understanding of many of the trouble spots in network programming. In the text we examine many areas that seem only peripherally connected to the core knowledge that a working network programmer is expected to have. We will see, however, that by gaining an understanding of these minutiae, we also gain an appreciation for how the inner workings of the network protocols can interact with our applications. Armed with this insight, application behavior that previously seemed bewildering becomes understandable, and the solutions to problems become clear.

The organization of the text is a little unusual. We examine common problems one at a time in a series of tips. During the process of studying a particular trouble spot, we usually explore some aspect of TCP/IP programming in depth. When we finish, we willnot only have identified and dealt with common problems, we will also have a fairly comprehensive understanding of how the TCP/IP protocols work and interact with our applications.

The organization of the text into tips leads to a certain disjointedness. To help guide you, Chapter 1 contains a road map that explains the material covered in each chapter and how it all hangs together. The Contents, which lists each tip, will give you a sense of the text's organization. Because the title of each tip is in the form of an imperative, we can also think of the Contents as a list of network programming precepts.

On the other hand, this organization into tips makes the text more useful as a handbook. When we run into a problem in our day-to-day work, it is easy to revisit the appropriate tip to refresh our understanding of that particular problem area. You will find that many topics are visited in more than one tip, sometimes from a slightly different viewpoint. This repetition helps solidify the concepts and makes them seem more natural.

Readers

This text is written primarily for the advanced beginner or intermediate network programmer, but more experienced readers should find it useful as well. Although the reader is presumed to have a familiarity with networking and the basic sockets API, Chapter 1 contains a review of the elementary socket calls and uses them to build a primitive client and server. Tip 4 (Develop and Use Application Skeletons) revisits the various client and server models in more detail, so even a reader with minimal background should be able to understand and benefit from the text.

Almost all of the examples are written in the C language, so a reasonably good understanding of elementary C programming is necessary to get the full benefit from the programs in the text. In Tip 31 (Remember That All the World's Not C) we show some examples written in Perl, but no knowledge of Perl is assumed. Similarly, there are a few examples of small shell programs, but again, no previous experience with shell programming is necessary to understand them.

The examples and text attempt to be platform neutral. The examples are, with a few exceptions, intended to compile and run under any UNIX or Win32 system. Even those programmers not working on a UNIX or Windows system should have little trouble porting the examples to work on their platforms.