In my opinion, Linux network programming, especially socket programming, isn’t that difficult. However, learning this topic on your own can be challenging because many online resources are unclear, and sample codes often only cover the basics. You might find yourself unsure of what to do next. That's why I created this tutorial. It aims to give you clear guidelines and plenty of examples to help you understand better.
Since I didn’t see this in the list of references, I have to ask — have you heard of the (famous) Beej’s Guide to Network Programming [1]? It’s a classic (in the sense that it’s been around for a long, long time and goes into many more details) on this topic.
beej was also a great place to take the first steps in network programming :) I just updated my reference list. This is one of my missing piece. Thank you for the reminder.
Actually is extremely simple. I learned by looking the original papers[0]
As you say, just lots of bad examples online. The only thing that made me a little bit crazy at the beginning, was the fact that TCP is a stream without delimiters, no packet concept. Other than that, is not more difficult than writing and reading a file.
Thank you for referring to a BSD document. Most people have no idea that the modern reference network stack implementation comes from BSD and not Linux.
The guide looks well written and I can't see any major errors (just skimmed it.) But some of the diagrams are potentially misleading. E.g.
read <---- write
write ----> read
Implies that send/recv perfectly correlate to each other when they can be split up in stream sockets. Your code addresses that already with loops. So I know you know that. Just confusing diagrams I guess.
I don't know of one. However, Python's socket API is mostly a thin wrapper around the C socket API. Assuming you know Python, it should be easy enough to learn from a tutorial like this one without a Python-specific guide. Note the matching function and constant names:
very nicely done! smallest nitpick in the world but "comprehensive" and "linux" kinda sorta implies I could read at least a blurb about epoll and io_uwrong or whatever its called lol