Olivier Langlois's blog

This is considered by many as the TCP/IP application programming bible and I am among them. This book is simply the most complete and detailed book on Socket programming. It describes every option under all their small details. This makes the book reading lengthy and tedious but it also makes it an excellent reference. Even experienced socket programmers will most likely learn something from this book. For myself, I got a better understanding of the listen() parameter purpose, a better understanding of socket lingering behavior and I refer the book from time to time to refresh my memory on topics such as how to time out a TCP connection attempt.

After having borrowed the second edition from someone at my work, I have decided to get myself a copy of the book. I have purchased the third edition. As of the time of writing this review the price for a used copy of the second edition is 6$ compared to 60$ for the third edition. Since I had the chance to compare the content of both editions, you might be interested to know that beside 1 bug fix in the sample code that I have noticed, the content of both edition is identical to 90% in my estimation. The changes are very minor. Some unimportant topics from the second edition such as XTI have been replaced by very specialized new topics. This means that, in my opinion, purchasing the older second edition which is still very accurate is a very good purchase.

ACE is an amazing C++ application framework to create portable networked applications. I wish that I could praise as much the first volume describing this framework but it has some weaknesses in my opinion. It enumerates one by one the different low-level ACE classes that encapsulates, by using the wrapper facade pattern, the differences in services provided by the supported platforms. These services include sockets, threading, process management and synchronization primitives. One strong point of the book is that it demonstrates how using C++ features (like strong typing and RAII idiom) with ACE classes can make programs safer and less prone to bugs. The book also briefly discusses how to design networked services based on the service requirement. My complain about the book is that it covers many topics but since it does not focus on any of them, unless you are totally new with C++ or TCP/IP applications, it is likely that you will not learn much. You will find the book interesting if:

• You have not yet seen the benefits of abstracting the implementation from the users with OO encapsulation
• You have little experience in programming TCP/IP applications

My expectation for this book was that I would learn details about the inner working of the ACE classes. The type knowledge that should have complemented the official documentation provided with the framework. I have found out that it is not really the case. Except for less experienced developers, I think that someone should be able to become able to use all the covered classes in the book with only the documentation coming with the framework. There are few places in the book where I would have like to get this extra information such as in the section on ACE_InputCDR and ACE_OutputCDR or by making sure it is clear for the readers why calling ACE_Handle_Set::sync() is needed after having called select().

I have started to read the second volume and I believe that the second one will fit better my likings as it covers high level patterns built on top of the low-level classes presented in the first volume.

Not all of the 44 tips are exceptional. Some of them are pretty trivial such as "Read Stevens books" or "consult RFCs" but about 35 tips are very good. The author knows well this topic and explains very well the reasons behind these tips. I am sure that all these good tips can be found in the TCP/IP Illustrated books but if you do not have the time to read 3 volumes consisting of about 2000 pages, this less than 300 pages book will provide a nice synthesis of TCP/IP programming good practices.

Windows sockets are not like BSD sockets. The book explains very well the different specific modes into which winsock can be used: Blocking mode in a dedicated thread, asynchronous mode using Windows messages and Overlapped I/O that removes some memory copying when passing buffer to send/receive data from/to sockets. It also covers the Socket classes provided with MFC. In my opinion, this book covers very well the details specific to Windows version of the socket API and that will allow the readers to take advantage of this socket API version.

I want to set the expectations straight. This is not the best Winsock programming book. This book address higher level issues with network programming and it does a very good job at it. It is going to presents the different options for writing a server such as concurrent vs iterative or single thread vs multithread and explains carefully the tradeoff of each option. In my opinion that is the strength and the originality of the book. Another favorite part of the book is the presentation of the complete implementation of a telnet client where the author leads you through all the design and implementation process by explaining you the reasoning behind each decision.

What I did not like about the book is that like the volume 1, too many topics are covered so in many chapters the author barely touch the topic without going in depth into it and I am questioning the value of these chapters as reference.

This is the Windows version but there is also a Linux/Posix Sockets and a BSD sockets versions.