[rubiquity]

It's nice to see this recent increased emphasis on Web/mobile developers understanding the technologies that link it all together. The next thing I would add is a high level overview of the sockets API. While these topics aren't critical to most day-to-day lives of developers, they are certainly useful to understand.

[marai2]

This is a very readable online book on networking and sockets: http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/multipage/index.html

Talk about understanding the sockets API ;-) here's the content section for chapter 5:

  5.1. getaddrinfo() — Prepare to launch!
  5.2. socket() — Get the File Descriptor!
  5.3. bind() — What port am I on?
  5.4. connect() — Hey, you!
  5.5. listen() — Will somebody please call me?

[stusmall]

I love beej's guide! Its where I learned socket programming. It is an art to make such a dry subject as entertaining as he does.

[jnbiche]

Beej is where I learned socket programming. A great guide.

[dnc]

Beej's guide is great! Thanks!

[nasalgoat]

I had one developer with over 6 years of server-side experience who made a server/client setup where the server would open a connection to the client, pass connection info to the client, close the connection, and then have the client open a connection back to the server to return results.

When I explained how TCP worked, in that the client could connect to the server and maintain an open socket to pass info continuously he was blown away. He had no idea this was possible. Explaining UDP was a lot harder.

So, I welcome any education on basic TCP/IP functionality!