Beej's Guide to Network Programming

Beej was there for me when I was a poor boy living in a 3rd world country with no Richard Stevens on any shelf. Along with Beej, I also thoroughly devoured NeHe's tutorials, the DOS assembly programming manual "Help PC", Ralph Brown's Interrupt list, Jack Crenshaw's "Let's Build a Compiler", and many many of the early Free programming texts in the web along with the "free" ones that were floating around in the various underground "scenes" ;-)

Wow. I remember this thing. I'm pretty sure I was a senior in High School when it came out (1994?). Reading through it today is trippy.<p>Of course --- don't do anything he says anymore; all due respect (because I used to love this thing), but pick up libevent instead. Writing your own select() loop was malpractice in 1999.

This was a lifesaver during my networking class at UC Berkeley. I think I spent more time referencing this than the textbook, although not much substitutes for just writing code and seeing what happens.

Wonderful document. My favorite quote, which apparently has been cut out of this newer version:<p>Now, you may think you're wising up to this. You might think, "What do I do if I have to change byte order on a char?" Then you might think, "Uh, never mind."

This is invaluable, it got me through a lot of systems programming courses. The examples are invaluable. This is the perfect resource for anyone who wants to get down and dirty with unix sockets.

Where would I go nowadays for similar, but more up-to-date, materials?

I love how most of the comments are reflections, or stories about how useful this is. I agree wholeheartedly, and when I saw the link was hoping it was now a full blown book or something.

This was how I learned to program with sockets 15 years ago, too. I'm surprised that none of the people who criticize it in the comments here have linked to what they consider a suitable replacement.<p>tpacek: writing networking code in C instead of Perl was malpractice in 1999, too. Except when it wasn't. You could make a reasonable argument that most things you would have done with sockets in 1994 should be done with a web server today...

Nice introduction to socket programming.<p>You might like to follow up with this:<p><a href="http://wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/01_intro.html" rel="nofollow">http://wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/01_intro.html</a><p>Which is the introduction to this:<p><a href="http://wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/TOC.html" rel="nofollow">http://wangafu.net/~nickm/libevent-book/TOC.html</a>

Man, this really brings back fond memories of my teenage life. Thanks for posting this.

15 years out of date, but this was a critical document when I was learning :)