publishing and books

This is one of the best programming books I've read! In the six months since I've bought this book and read through it, I've managed to program my own winsock wrapper class & functions along with a Win32 client-server app, based mainly on code and principles from this book. The included examples do need a bit of tweaking to work on MS VC++ 4.2, 5.0, and 6.0; and the executables included are mostly 16-bit apps; but the code itself is extremely useful.

This is an excellent book discussing not only Winsock but low level networking communication in general. Be advised though that this book was last published in 1996 so working in VisualC++ 6 will require a bit of tweaking. Also, this book is 95% Winsock 1.1. The last chapter covers Winsock 2 and is only 25 pages long.

I would have given this book a perfect rating had it been just a little more up to date. Don't get me wrong though, if you want to learn Winsock, this is the book to get. After reading through the whole book, I've used it for reference countless times.

Best Winsock book available IMHO.

I am a very experienced C/C++ software engineer currently taking a community college class on WinSock networking programming. I'm used to dealing with difficult text books. However this is one of the worst I have ever wrestled with.

There are no exercises in the book. All their examples are long; no short examples of code to clarify any topic. Their way of explaining most subjects seems to me to be unclear, their wording such that I have to read a paragraph several times to figure out what they are trying to say. Finally and especially, their explanation of the key topic of socket states is flat-out awful. I have had a little experience dealing tangentially with socket states on my last project, and I still came away from this chapter confused and with my head spinning.

I hope that there are better WinSock books than this out there!