HN Books @HNBooksMonth

The article is aimed at low-level network programmers. I learned the subject from Stevens [0] which is quite old but is still one of the standard references.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Network-Programming-Richard-Stev...

⬐ carlmr

I'm wondering if there's a good summary of this somewhere. 784 pages seems a bit much to get to know the basics of networking.

Maybe it IS that complicated, but I'm wondering if it's worth it for me as a developer that only sometimes touches on these issues, to read through it.

⬐ jmchuster

Understanding networking is basically a "superpower" of sorts for programmers.

⬐ foxfluff

It's not that complicated. For a basic TCP socket application, you need a couple dozen lines of code. Explaining how it works isn't going to require a 1000 page book. Of course networking and network programming is a deep topic, but IMO once you get the basics down, you're soon at the stage where "you'll know it if you need it" w.r.t. more advanced stuff and can learn it on demand.

I skimmed that book and it does go quite deep, but also has lots of asides into C programming and Unix in general.

For example, at one point it introduces you to the idea of wrapper functions to simplify error handling. This has nothing to do with socket programming or networking. There's BSD networking history, which might not be worth your time. There's introduction to Unix commands that are outdated if you're on Linux, but "be aware that some vendors place these commands in an administrative directory, such as /sbin". There's a section on Unix standards; would you like to know what POSIX stands for? Would you like to know about 64-bit architectures? Would you like to learn about memset() and memmove(), or fork() and exec()? How about fcntl() and close(), or posix signal handling, or waitpid()? Here let me introduce you to select() and poll() and nonblocking i/o. And pthreads...

It's by no means a bad book but it's about "Unix" and "(C) programming" almost as much as it is about network programming. Depending on your background that may or may not be a bad thing but I prefer materials with narrower focus.

+1 for Unix Network Programming. http://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Network-Programming-Richard-Steve...