TCP/IP Sockets in C#: Practical Guide for Programmers

I have modest experience with sockets programming. Generally I've been able to take advantage of frameworks provided for me. However, I've recently been called upon to do performance comparisons between .NET Remoting, Windows Communication Foundation (wCF), and raw .NET sockets. With this book I was able to get up and running very quickly. I had a real-world problem and I was able to solve it easily with this book. That single solution makes it worth the price when one hour of time can [...]. For a book such as this that is the highest praise I can give. In a larger sense, I think the brevity of this book makes it terrific place to start.

I've read through the first couple of chapters and I must say this is a good book. The thing I like most about this book is that the authors take time to not only give you working code but explain what the heck blocks within the programs do. If you are a novice programmer you may want to pick up a different book because it does assume you have a good understanding of basic C# programming.

This book delivers a good understanding of sockets. I have read one or two other books regarding the subject. The thing I like about this one is A) the whole book is dedicated to it. B) Its explanations are probably the best I have read regarding any topic in programming. Remember first starting C++, and the first chapters of the book taught you how to add integers? You kind of sit there saying "Yeah, Yeah, get on with the hard stuff". As a total compliment: That is how this books makes you feel about sockets! The explanations and examples almost make it impossible to believe it is really that simple.

I loved this book! I bought this book not knowing anything about sockets. All I knew was that I had to use them for my next project. I bought this book, and within 2 weeks time had developed a full-scale proof-of-concept, distributed, client-server type application communicating over TCP/IP and using UDP for multicasting. The examples are concise and practical, including examples of data framing/parsing and how to deal with different wire formats (big/little endian). This book is a must-have for any serious C# programmer.

TCP/IP Sockets in C# delivers an incredible amount of knowledge considering it is only 175 pages! The authors spend the first chapter looking at TCP and UDP protocols, their differences and benefits. By chapter two you are already experimenting with sockets. The authors go over the TcpClient/TcpListener classes, as well as the more low-level raw socket class. The book is extremely easy to read, and is moist with interesting examples. They also cover asynchronous I/O, handling multiple connections, retrieving EndPoint information about the connecting sockets (IP Address, host info, etc..). Then FINALLY in the middle of the book they did a marvelous job of explaining byte ordering, encoding, threading, etc... I was happy to find that we are freely able to use the raw socket classes just as we did with the Winsock 2 API. I would definetly recommend this book to C# novices, and experts who want to learn about TCP/IP sockets. This book does not teach the C# language, however, even if you're not 100% sure about the C# language, the authors don't really use advanced programming techniques to confuse you. Face it, socket programming is one of the easiest things you'll ever do!! FIVE STARS!!!!