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Getting to Grips with Socket APIs

In this chapter, we will begin to really start working with network programming. We will introduce the concept of sockets, and explain a bit of the history behind them. We will cover the important differences between the socket APIs provided by Windows and Unix-like operating systems, and we will review the common functions that are used in socket programming. This chapter ends with a concrete example of turning a simple console program into a networked program you can access through your web browser.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

What are sockets?
Which header files are used with socket programming?
How to compile a socket program on Windows, Linux, and macOS
Connection-oriented and connectionless sockets
TCP and UDP protocols
Common socket functions
Building a simple console program into a web server

...

Key benefits

Apply your C and C++ programming skills to build powerful network applications

Get to grips with a variety of network protocols that allow you to load web pages, send emails, and do much more

Write portable network code for Windows, Linux, and macOS

Description

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.

What you will learn

Uncover cross-platform socket programming APIs

Implement techniques for supporting IPv4 and IPv6

Understand how TCP and UDP connections work over IP

Discover how hostname resolution and DNS work

Interface with web APIs using HTTP and HTTPS

Explore Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) for electronic mail transmission

Apply network programming to the Internet of Things (IoT)

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Instant access to your digital copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

Redeem a companion digital copy on all Print orders

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DRM FREE - Read whenever, wherever and however you want

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Minerva Feb 16, 2020

I just finished this book, and I learned a ton.Concepts are introduced in a logical order, and each chapter has complete working examples to illustrate exactly how everything goes together.All of the code works on multiple operating systems too, even though Windows and Linux have different APIs. This is all explained throughout the book.Near the end of the book, in chapter 13, several networking edge-cases and gotchas are discussed.So, solutions to a bunch of problems before you even know you have them! I'm sure these edge-cases will save me a lot of frustration in the future.This book is written by someone who has a complete grasp of C.The difference - and why you should buy this book - is the writer is also gifted with the ability to explain C Programming clearly and methodically.Many tech writers use a publishing platform as a way to showcase their knowledge which leads to information overload and reader confusion. Mr.VanWinkle writes without ego; a style other tech writers would do well to emulate. I look forward to reading more from this author.I highly recommend this for anyone interested in network programming with C orC++.

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Stan Edwards Nov 21, 2019

I was tasked with adding some simple network functionality to a legacy program. It only needed to hit a simple online API and read a one-word response. Seems easy, right? I know there are a lot of free libraries to do this, so I tried several of them first. I either couldn't get them to work properly, or they messed up our (admittedly over-complicated) build system.Anyway, I had my work buy three books on the topic, figuring I'd implement the needed functionality from scratch. This is the only book I ended up using, and I basically just copied the example program. The examples are licensed MIT, so we're allowed to use them. I got it working perfectly within a few hours. It's all pure C/C++ code, so it works fine with our weird build system. It compiles on all of our platforms, plays nice with IPv6, ad doesn't cause any problems.I don't imagine there are too many people needing C/C++ networking code in 2019, but if you're such a person, this is perhaps the only good modern book on the topic.

Gavin Henry Nov 23, 2021

Real world working code examples and a responsive author to questions. I used chapter 4 in this book to build SentryPeer. Search in github :)

Basantj Jun 12, 2019

While I am still in the process of reading the book, from what I have read it is very well written and detailed. The author is clearly knowledgeable and works hard to rectify misinformation on the web about C networking code.This book definitely is for someone with some proficiency in the C language. If you are able to follow along, it goes into incredible depth and provides an incredible understanding at a low level. Personally, I only have experience with C++/Java and I still found it relatively understandable—so it isn't too much of a barrier anyways.Hopefully I hope to have more positive things to say about this book when I get through more of it!

Clay Feb 03, 2021

I've split this review into three parts: good, bad, and neutral.First the good:I would recommend this book for the beginner or intermediate programmer that wants to write network programs in C or C++. I might recommend this book to the intermediate programmer of another language that wants to learn how networking works "under the hood," but in this case probably only the fist few chapters will be of much interest.Most chapters follow the same basic format. The first half of the chapter is used to introduce and explain a concept. Then the second half of the chapter works through a full example program to demonstrate how things work in practice. The examples are very good. The author has a knack for keeping the examples short but functional.I personally ran every example program from the book. They all compiled and run perfectly!I also want to note that this book does a good job of having each example program run on multiple platforms. When I was working through this book, I ended up looking at a lot of open-source networking programs on the Internet. I never found a single bit of networking code outside of this book that would run on both Windows and Unix. All of the cross-platform examples I found in the wild would use a complex build system to essentially compile different source files for each platform. The code in this book uses a couple macros to ensure that each source file compiles on each platform, and it doesn't require any fancy build system. Although there are trade-offs, I really like the approach taken by this book!The first half of the book takes a foundational approach. The first chapter shows how to get your computer's local IP address. Then a few chapters are spent showing the absolute basics of TCP and UDP communication. Early on, the book is careful to explain how to handle multiple connections at once without blocking.The chapters that talk about DNS, HTTP, and email show and explain examples that work from the ground up without any external dependencies. I was surprised to see that the DNS chapter actually builds a complete DNS client from scratch. DNS is a binary protocol, so this is kind of impressive. HTTP and email (SMTP) are much easier protocols, being text, but the examples are still nice.One chapter builds a working web server from scratch. This web server accepts multiple clients and can serve text and binary files. Most of the code is concerned with processing the HTTP text requests and serving multiple clients without blocking. Like the rest of the book, it uses the cross-platform "just compile and it works" style. There is a chapter near the end that addresses error-handling and some common problems. It uses several small example programs to illustrate what can go wrong and how to avoid it. I spent a lot of time playing with these, and let me tell you, socket programming is tricky to get right. I appreciate the book hammering in some weird things that can go wrong that I wouldn't have otherwise thought about.Also, all of the example code for this book is available on GitHub, and importantly, it actually works. I've seen too many books with broken code. This book's GitHub uses Travis-CI and AppVeyor to automatically compile everything on multiple platforms, multiple compilers, and as C and C++. You can see all the build logs on the GitHub. Check it out. It's impressive. The author clearly put a lot of work into making sure no bugs got through.The bad:I wish the book addressed some platform-specific issues. For socket multiplexing, only the "select" function is really explained and used. The book briefly mentions a few alternatives, but sticks to "select" because it is available on Windows and Unix. It would have been nice to see more about the better-preforming platform-specific options.None of the example code has any comments. I guess you could consider the book itself the comments, but it would have been nice to see some comments in the code. At least that would have a made it much easier to work with the code outside of the book. Not a big deal though.A couple of the examples, particularly the text parsing, seem a little too complicated. In the HTTP client code, for example, I found an "if" statement nested about 5 levels deep. I'm guessing the book did it this way to keep the linear narrative in the book, and also to keep the code short, but I would definitely refactor it into a few different functions. Again, comments would have helped a lot!Also, there is one "goto" in the book. It's used to bail out of a doubly-nested loop, so it's a reasonable enough use, but I think the inner loop should have been refactored into its own function.The chapters with encryption use external libraries. The HTTPS client and server programs are simply the HTTP programs from earlier in the book, but now all the communication goes through the OpenSSL library. I don't like the OpenSSL library. It is hard to set up and compile and it seems it has a new security flaw exposed every year. I feel like the author could have just covered the basics and moved on. I didn't need to see the entire programs from the earlier chapters reimplemented.The chapter on SSH only shows how to use the libssh library. It didn't seem to teach anything fundamental, and I don't have a use for SSH, so I only skimmed it.The last chapter on Internet of Things is disappointing, and it doesn't fit in with the rest of the book. The chapter sort of just talks about big picture ideas about how IoT devices work. For example, it'll tell you that a Bluetooth watch can't talk directly to your router via Wi-Fi, so you should connect your Bluetooth watch to a smartphone, and then use a smartphone app to upload data to the Internet. It would have been nice to have more a bit more substance.The neutral:The way the author explains error handling for this book is that error handling is usually application-specific. So the best that can be done in a short example program is to print the error code and abort. All the examples I looked at seemed to do reasonable error handling, but when they encounter an error they just print a code and abort. If you do network programming, you will encounter errors. Some of the other reviews on here seem to blame the book for this, but that's not reasonable. If your network stack is broken, or your internet is down, or you're trying to reuse a port number, or whatever, you'll get an error code. It's up to the user to figure out the fix. There's nothing the code could really do in those cases (i.e. the code can't plug your Ethernet cable back in for you).Summary:I think the book is well-written. It moves at a good pace, and it covers interesting topics. I ran all of the example programs, just to play around with them, and they all worked great. If building a working web server from scratch appeals to you, this is the book to get!

Hands-On Network Programming with C: Learn socket programming in C and write secure and optimized network code

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Hands-On Network Programming with C

Getting to Grips with Socket APIs

Technical requirements

What are sockets?

Socket setup

Two types of sockets

Socket functions

Anatomy of a socket program

Berkeley sockets versus Winsock sockets

Header files

Socket data type

Our first program

A motivating example

Summary

Questions

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