C# Network Programming

I used a number of books as references for a server project in C#, including the "TCP/IP Sockets in C#" book referenced in another review, but that book is more geared toward academic use (though to his credit I emailed one of the authors of the book regarding multithreading issues that were not addressed in print and he was very responsive, so I support the purchase of that book to round out your sockets library as well). Blum's book provided far more practical advice relating to my project and was the one I consistently returned to for reference. I had an issue not addressed directly in the book, did a Google search on it and found the answer...by the book's author in an online discussion forum! In short, it is virtually impossible to find a book that addresses every last real-world gotcha inherent in starting any new project with a new language and class library as vast as .NET's, but if you have a C# sockets project to do then I can't recommend another book more than this one.

This is an excellent introduction to network programming. Even if you don't use C#/.NET, you may still want to have a look at this book as it discusses IP programming and techniques from first principles. For example, the book includes an overview of socket programming in the Unix world, then moves on to Winsock specifics before introducing the socket and higher-level classes in .NET. I really like the author's approach of explaining multiple ways to solve a particular network programming issue, such as how to deal with the fact that using TCP by itself doesn't preserve message boundaries. All of the code samples can be downloaded from the Sybex website and there is complete and perfect tie-in to the samples from the book. In fact, all of the code is reproduced in the book so you can effectively read it from cover to cover without a computer. Besides just listing source files, the author always explains what each block of code is doing. The code samples typically consist of self-contained client and server programs that illustrate a particular network programming topic. I found most of them can be tested on the same PC (except that you won't be able to analyze the network traffic as there won't be any). A few of them require two PCs as the client and server bind to the same IP port. To test the SNMP client programs, I didn't have access to a real Cisco router so I just downloaded a trial version of an SNMP agent simulator from iReasoning to test the programs. To reach the largest audience, the book describes how to compile, build and debug the sample programs using the command line tools in the .NET Framework SDK (which is a free download from Microsoft). I used Visual Studio .NET 2003 instead and had no problems with building any of the samples. Overall, the book does a great job of explaining what can be a complex subject area. It would have been good though if the author included an advanced topics chapter that discusses popular network-aware applications (such as chat programs, file-sharing systems, etc) and how they are implemented architecturally.

This is one of those rare books that combines simple, direct, and to-the-point code examples with simple, direct, and to-the-point explanations. Both TCP/IP and UDP are covered, and there is an excellent discussion of what has to be done to interface with a non-Windows operating system. This is the clearest treatment of Serialization and Deserialization (XML, binary, and SOAP) that I've seen. I read this book from cover to cover; it is excellent.

I really found this book to be highly informative. I credit this one for helping me learn most of what I know about C# socket level programming. Topics covered various non-blocking methods including asynchronous processing via delegates, using threads both manually and with threadpools. He even included sections on how to handle incoming connections by polling. I also liked his "when TCP goes bad" chpater which discusses how to use .NET to circumvent errors and inconsistencies in transmission.Yes, this book does tackle tricky programming issues - but that's the nature of socket programming. If you want to get the most out of this book, read it several times and start writing your own programs using the techniques described. I spent quite a bit of time with this book writing a light-weight custom HTTP server using what I learned from this book.

The author takes a bottom-up approach and gave a nice treatment on the underlying details of how TCP/IP networks operate, and then (almost) seamlessly moved up to how to write actual programs to handle common network related tasks, in C#.The examples are concise and to the point. Richard definitely gave a lot of thought to the structure of contents, and whenever I have some concern about a subject, an answer is often given right in the next paragraph.(There are just a couple typos but most of them are quite apparent and do not pose a source of confusion.)