TCP/IP Illustrated

Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. Introduction

This chapter provides an introduction to the Berkeley networking code. We start with a description of the source code presentation and the various typographical conventions used throughout the text. A quick history of the various releases of the code then lets us see where the source code shown in this book fits in. This is followed by a description of the two predominant programming interfaces used under both Unix and non-Unix systems to write programs that use the TCP/IP protocols.

We then show a simple user program that sends a UDP datagram to the daytime server on another host on the local area network, causing the server to return a UDP datagram with the current time and date ...