I remember the first stuff I read about network programming. It was the Beej’s Guide to network programming. Concise and straight to the point, this guide have been used for several years. Beej describes the socket API with hopefully as little hassle as humanly possible (Beej). Yes, good things resist to the time. And I can cite some more examples, with similar success.

TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1, 1994, by W. Richard Stevens. Fantastic book, despite its publish date. It cover in details several important protocols, like TCP, UDP, IP, ICMP and others. Stevens published other volumes for this series, as you could imagine. The second volume (The implementation) is devoted to source code and talks about BSD 4.4. Since many companies used BSD as starting point for theirs network stack implementations, it is simple to realize its importance.

UNIX Network Programming, third edition, 2004, by W. Richard Stevens (again), Bill Fenner and Andrew M.Rudoff. This book was originally written by Stevens but after he passed away, in 1999, the book got an edition with new co-authors. In this book, the socket API is unveiled. Recent protocols, like IPv6 and SCTP are discussed as well. It is a book for programmers and a great reference. Unfortunately, it is too thick to put under your pillow.

Although these books use C as default language, the socket API does not change significantly when choosing another programming language. In fact, newer languages just implemented socket API since it is a kind of de facto standard.

It is important to cite some specific book for Python. For instance, Foundations of Python Network Programming, 2004, by John Goerzen covers not only socket API but several important modules found in Python. It is a good companion, certainly.

By its turn, PyS60 network programming is very close to standard Python programming, just showing some sort of limitations (some socket options, for instance).

A lot of books, no code at all. Yes, sorry. But we will have some fun in next post, I promise !

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