Table of contents

Books and longer tutorials

• A good classical text to learn the basics of network programming is the three-volume book series “TCP/IP Illustrated” by W. Richard Stevens.
• Another book by W. Richard Stevens (together with Bill Fenner, Andrew M. Rudoff in the third edition) is the two-volume book “UNIX Network Programming”. It is recommended at Production failures due to bugs in both TCP-based servers and clients happen all... | Hacker News [visited 2021-02-13T19:20:03Z].
• Another often recommended text to learn network programming under POSIX is Beej's Guide to Network Programming [visited 2018-07-10T13:30:52Z]. Nevertheless, under modern UNIX-like operating systems, one should in my opinion better use epoll (Linux) or kqueue (FreeBSD, OS X) instead of poll for improved scalability. This is unluckily not considered in this text.
• At https://beej.us/guide/bgipc/html/multi/index.html is also good | Hacker News [visited 2021-02-13T20:23:59Z], it is mentioned that Beej's Guide to Unix Interprocess Communication [visited 2021-02-13T20:25:44Z] is also good (of course, this text has nothing to do with network programming).
• At If I remember correctly this network programming tutorial has been around for mo... | Hacker News [2021-02-13T19:57:58Z], the book “Hands-On Network Programming with C” by Lewis Van Winkle is recommended.
• At Socket programming never clicked for me before I learned about the protocols the... | Hacker News [visited 2021-02-13T19:04:41Z], the three-volume book series “Internetworking With TCP/IP” by Douglas Comer is recommended (website of the book series: Comer Books on Networking [visited 2021-02-13T19:06:43Z]).

Socket programming

• SO_REUSEADDR and SO_REUSEPORT: linux - How do SO_REUSEADDR and SO_REUSEPORT differ? - Stack Overflow< [visited 2022-08-07T14:29:19Z]
• SO_LINGER: linux - What really is the "linger time" that can be set with SO_LINGER on sockets? - Stack Overflow [visited 2022-08-07T14:29:29Z]

TCP/IP

TCP/IP stacks

• Let's code a TCP/IP stack (source of the dates of publication: saminiir's hacker blog [visited 2019-12-15T19:15:20Z]):
  • Let's code a TCP/IP stack, 1: Ethernet & ARP [published 2016-03-06; visited 2019-12-15T19:45:10Z]
  • Let's code a TCP/IP stack, 2: IPv4 & ICMPv4 [published 2016-04-24; visited 2019-12-15T19:45:55Z]
  • Let's code a TCP/IP stack, 3: TCP Basics & Handshake [published 2016-05-15; visited 2019-12-15T19:46:08Z]
  • Let's code a TCP/IP stack, 4: TCP Data Flow & Socket API [published 2016-12-06; visited 2019-12-15T19:46:44Z]
  • Let's code a TCP/IP stack, 5: TCP Retransmission [published 2017-07-05; visited 2019-12-15T19:47:01Z]
• GitHub - cozis/microtcp: A minimal TCP/IP stack [visited 2023-11-17T03:19:50Z]

TCP/IP tutorials

• RFC 1180 - TCP/IP tutorial [visited 2020-04-29T00:13:24Z]
• How does a TCP Reset Attack work? [published 2020-04-27; visited 2020-04-29T00:14:27Z]
• TCP Puzzlers [published 2016-08-18; visited 2019-09-01T11:40:24Z]

Fragmentation

• Valerie Aurora
  • Fragquiz: test your IP fragmentation knowledge [visited 2024-02-17T20:29:58Z]
  • So you think you understand IP fragmentation?
    • Article: So you think you understand IP fragmentation? [LWN.net] [visited 2024-02-17T20:54:24Z]
    • Hacker News discussion: So you think you understand IP fragmentation? | Hacker News [visited 2024-02-17T20:54:34Z]

IOCP

When using Windows, it is best to use an I/O Completion Port (IOCP) for well-scaling network code.

• A good introductory presentation on the philosophy behind IOCP can be found at https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-gil-and-exploited-all-cores [visited 2018-07-10T15:45:11Z]; information on IOCP starts on slide 38: https://speakerdeck.com/trent/pyparallel-how-we-removed-the-gil-and-exploited-all-cores [visited 2022-08-11T16:07:16Z].

• At Dr.Dobbs has had at least 2 articles on it. https://www.drdobbs.com/open-source... | Hacker News [visited 2021-02-13T20:04:00Z] - also consider its parent Sadly the Windows asynchronous (or something, I never quite got it) networking A... | Hacker News [visited 2021-02-13T20:04:38Z] - the author whizzter mentions the following two Dr.Dobb's links:

  • I/O Multiplexing & Scalable Socket Servers | Dr Dobb's [visited 2021-02-13T20:14:31Z]
  • Multithreaded Asynchronous I/O & I/O Completion Ports | Dr Dobb's [visited 2021-02-13T20:14:37Z]

  He also writes

  I remember chatting in the fringes when nodeJS was doing their proper win32 porting and they did have some issues getting things stable due to lack of documentation but iirc got some help from MS so the libuv code should be usable as a reference for behaviours (As well as being fairly battle tested by now).

  and links to libuv/src/win at v1.x · libuv/libuv [visited 2021-02-13T20:08:12Z].

Packet decoding and captures

• Hex Packet Decoder
• SampleCaptures - The Wireshark Wiki [visited 2020-01-04T19:17:12Z]