The Open Source Zone

Nice book in terms of content, probably one can learn much of the concepts, however it is too old. The examples could not be compiled anymore, without significant effort.

I found that this book very helpful for me to get a good practical foundation on TCP/IP Sockets. The book is well-organized as a tutorial covering from the basics to ftp & telnet protocol and implementation. The real fun is with the program examples which is manageable to get all the great feelings and fun. One note to make it work, as it is complied with Visual C++ v1.5. It will fail with fatal error during linkage. To make it work with Visual C++ v6, one needs to change: (1) #include "winsock.h" to #include "windows.h" (2) change link option (in Project | Setting | Link) from winsock.lib to ws2_32.lib. This is explained in "INFO: README for Win32 Software Development Kit, Part 1 of 2 ID: Q167799" of MSDN library.

At first, the book appears to present its information in a fairly intelligent fashion, but when the reader wants to get beyond simple demo applications or the basic principles of socket programming, Ms. Bonner offers little practical advice.

With this book, without any previous socket knowledge, I was able to write a functioning socket application for downloading instrument data from a ticker server...however, when it came to a crunch, the samples provided with the Windows SDK were more useful than this book. Still a good book, though.