As the computer world becomes more networked, network-aware applications are increasingly important. Linux provides the Berkeley socket API, which has become the standard networking API. We discuss the basics of using Berkeley sockets for both TCP/IP networking and simple interprocess communication (IPC) through Unix-domain sockets.
This chapter is not intended to be a complete guide to network programming. Network programming is a complicated topic, and we recommend dedicated network programming books for programmers who intend to do serious work with sockets [Stevens, 2004]. This chapter should be sufficient to allow you to write simple networked applications, however.
