Network Programming with Perl By Lincoln D. Stein Slots : 1
Table of Contents
Part 4: Advanced Topics
Content
Chapter 18. The UDP Protocol
Up to now we have focused exclusively on applications that use the TCP protocol and have said little about the User Datagram Protocol, or UDP. This is because TCP is generally easier to use, more reliable, and more familiar to programmers who are used to dealing with files and pipes. On the Internet, TCP-based applications protocols outnumber those based on UDP by a factor of at least 10 to 1.
Nevertheless, UDP is extremely useful for certain applications, and sometimes can do things that would be difficult, if not impossible , for a TCP-based service to achieve. The next few chapters introduce UDP, discuss the design of UDP-based servers, and show how to use UDP for broadcasting and multicasting applications.
