Tuesday, October 10, 2009

Free chm ebook download: Tcp/Ip illustrated, volume 1, the protocols

By W. Richard Stevens

This book describes the TCP/IP protocol suite, but from a different perspective than other texts on TCP/IP. Instead of just describing the protocols and what they do, we'll use a popular diagnostic tool to watch the protocols in action. Seeing how the protocols operate in varying circumstances provides a greater understanding of how they work and why certain design decisions were made. It also provides a look into the implementation of the protocols, without having to wade through thousands of lines of source code.

When networking protocols were being developed in the 1960s through the 1980s, expensive, dedicated hardware was required to see the packets going "across the wire." Extreme familiarity with the protocols was also required to comprehend the packets displayed by the hardware. Functionality of the hardware analyzers was limited to that built in by the hardware designers.

Today this has changed dramatically with the ability of the ubiquitous workstation to monitor a local area network [Mogul 1990]. Just attach a workstation to your network, run some publicly available software (described in Appendix A), and watch what goes by on the wire. While many people consider this a tool to be used for diagnosing network problems, it is also a powerful tool for understanding how the network protocols operate, which is the goal of this book.

This book is intended for anyone wishing to understand how the TCP/IP protocols operate: programmers writing network applications, system administrators responsible for maintaining computer systems and networks utilizing TCP/IP, and users who deal with TCP/IP applications on a daily basis.

Download the free chm: Tcp/Ip illustrated, volume 1, the protocols.chm

Tags: Tcp, IP, protocol


Tuesday, October 10, 2009

Free pdf ebook download: TCP IP Sockets in C, Second Edition Practical Guide for Programmers

When we wrote the first edition of this book, it was not very common for college courses on
networking to include programming components. That seems difficult to believe now, when
the Internet has become so important to our world, and the pedagogical benefits of hands-on
programming and real-world protocol examples are so widely accepted. Although there are now
other languages that provide access to the Internet, interest in the original C-based Berkeley
Sockets  remains high. The Sockets API (application programming interface) for networking
was developed at UC Berkeley in the 1980s for the BSD flavor of UNIX—one of the very first
examples of what would now be called an open-source project.
The Sockets API and the Internet both grew up in a world of many competing protocol
families—IPX, Appletalk, DECNet, OSI, and SNA in addition to Transmission Control Proto-
col/Internet Protocal (TCP/IP)—and Sockets was designed to support them all. Fewer protocol
families were in common use by the time we wrote the first edition of this book, and the num-
ber today is even smaller. Nevertheless, as we predicted in the first edition, the Sockets API
remains important for those who want to design and build distributed applications that use
the Internet—that is, that use TCP/IP. And the interface has proven robust enough to support
the new version of the Internet Protocol (IPv6), which is now supported on virtually all common
computing platforms.
Two main considerations motivated this second edition. First, based on our own experi-
ence and feedback from others, we found that some topics needed to be presented in more
depth and that others needed to be expanded. The second consideration is the increasing
acceptance and use of IP version 6, which is now supported by essentially all current end sys-
tem platforms. At this writing, it is not possible to use IPv6 to exchange messages with a large
fraction of hosts on the Internet, but it is possible to assign an IPv6 address to many of them.
Although it is still too early to tell whether IPv6 will take over the world, it is not too early to
start writing applications to be prepared.

Download the free ebook: TCP IP Sockets in C, Second Edition Practical Guide for Programmers

Tags: C, TCP, IP, Socket