Introduction to the Art of Programming Using Scala

Chapter 23

Networking

In the 1990s Sun Microsystems®, a server hardware company and the creator of Java, had an advertising campaign with the slogan, "The network is the computer". Given the date, their proclamation has had remarkable foresight. Today there are few things that you do on a computer that do not use network access and many computing devices are built specifically for use with a network connection of some form. You might often find that your devices become far less useful to you when they are not connected.

At a basic level, networking is just having computers talk to one another. This allows them to share information and for programs on one computer to react to things that happen on another computer. So far we have written programs ...