Chapter 5 -- Network Principles and Protocols

Chapter 5

The main motivation for creating the Winsock 2 specification was to provide a protocol-independent transport interface. This is wonderful in that it provides one familiar interface for network programming over a variety of network transports, but you should still be aware of the network protocol characteristics. This chapter covers the traits that you should be aware of when utilizing a particular protocol, including some basic networking principles. Additionally, we'll discuss how to programmatically query Winsock for protocol information, and we'll examine the basic steps necessary to create a socket for a given protocol.