Beej's Guide to Network Programming (opens in new tab)

If I'm not mistaken this original document was on Chico State's computer science domain. It was my understanding Beej went to Chico; does anyone know for sure? This was around long before 2006, I remember reading it around the year 2000 when I was first getting into C++. (miracle this quality of a document escaped anyone's brain in Chico -- I know, I went to CSUC. Let's just say it was hard to concentrate there :)

Is there a similar or updated guide some place which includes non-blocking i/o?

Still not updated to mention anything more than select() as far as non-blocking IO is concerned, like poll, epoll, or, god no, using an abstract event loop. Nobody who cares about their code and sanity does blocking I/O with sockets.

But then, I must confess I too started network programming with this guide :) It presents the basics nicely, but there's a lot more you should learn about network programming.

When I was at university I wanted to take a class that had 'introduction to computer networks' as a prerequisite, but I didn't want to wait 2 semesters for it to come around again after taking networks first. I spoke to the professor and he said he'd let me enroll in the course if I promised to carefully read Beej's guide first, since it contains all the essentials I'd really need for this follow-on. So, this saved me 6 months, what a golden nugget!

This was an absolute lifesaver when I was thrown into the deep end writing a high-performance TCP server from scratch. I think it's so effective because it's "highly opinionated", which is to say, he points out "Foo does this, but don't use it because that's just silly" or "don't use bar, use baz instead because it handles qux more easily" and so on.

it's a shortcut to learn basic network programming with sockets, without spending too much time on it. Anyone more than casually serious about it should consider looking at Richard Stevens books, Unix network programming and TCP/IP illustrated (esp. volume 2).

learning from this now. glad its got all this credibility! (context: college operating systems course)

I owe this guy my entry into network programming and eventually security.

For this community, I would have thought this is a bit like seeing a link to Google.com on the HN front page. Beej's guide is staple internet fodder.

This is one of those priceless documents that served me well, and which I have recommended to many others as a great starting place.

Still refer to it every so often, especially as backup documentation from the man pages when something isn't entirely clear.

Like others, this is how i learned to do it too. The C programming guide is very good too

lol soooo retro! brings back memories almost 10 years old. i used it as a guideline for writing an SMS notifier on incoming e-mails through free HTTP SMS service. with auth. ;)

+1 !!

This is the number one thing that got me through network class back in university. Next to that is the professor's office hour. I don't think I even touched the textbook.

Is there an even better, more modern networking guide that's free (or not)? Does anyone have a list of networking reference/tutorial/introduction material?

Wow, I am glad that this is still around - the first tutorial that I learned socket and network programming back in 2004.

Its nice to know other guys learned from this as well. Makes me feel that what I learned back in college was legit.

This saved me when I had to write a P2P file distribution system for a project in college.

This was the go-to guide back in its times. Circa 2006?

This was my first look at networking. Worked for me.

I learned from this in 2006-2007.

truely classics. i learned network programming from this guide a decade ago.

A reference for beginners!

At first, I was confused, thinking that the porn site beeg.com posted a networking tutorial.

This is how I learned to do it.