I want to set the expectations straight. This is not the best Winsock programming book. This book address higher level issues with network programming and it does a very good job at it. It is going to presents the different options for writing a server such as concurrent vs iterative or single thread vs multithread and explains carefully the tradeoff of each option. In my opinion that is the strength and the originality of the book. Another favorite part of the book is the presentation of the complete implementation of a telnet client where the author leads you through all the design and implementation process by explaining you the reasoning behind each decision.

What I did not like about the book is that like the volume 1, too many topics are covered so in many chapters the author barely touch the topic without going in depth into it and I am questioning the value of these chapters as reference.

I want to set the expectations straight. This is not the best Winsock programming book. This book address higher level issues with network programming and it does a very good job at it. It is going to presents the different options for writing a server such as concurrent vs iterative or single thread vs multithread and explains carefully the tradeoff of each option. In my opinion that is the strength and the originality of the book. Another favorite part of the book is the presentation of the complete implementation of a telnet client where the author leads you through all the design and implementation process by explaining you the reasoning behind each decision.

What I did not like about the book is that like the volume 1, too many topics are covered so in many chapters the author barely touch the topic without going in depth into it and I am questioning the value of these chapters as reference.

If you're just a beginner, or you're moving to Winsock from Unix; then the book covers all you need.

But does not include the details of the Winsock (overlapped io, dealing with multiple providers (for different protocols), async io, etc). So I believe that the title should not include "windows sockets version"

I decided to write this note after a fourth person asked me about my favorite book for winsock programming.

The answer is, since winsock is built on BSD sockets, and what isn't in BSD sockets but is in winsock is mostly Windows operating system related, your best bet is still the MSDN reference material. That is, if you already have some background in TCP/IP from Unix platform. If not, and you insist on a winsock specific book, there are not that many choices I know of. So this is probably your best bet.

If you are a beginning TCP/IP programmer, this will help. Pretty readable and well organized. But most of the examples in the book are for the type of applications which have already been written and rewritten several times over in the world and you can always find those someplace on the web. I find myself going to back to Richard Stevens volumes and to the RFCs, online documentations at Microsoft and elsewhere. But then, that might be because I started my TCP/IP days from UNIX/SunOS/IRIX.

For beginning TCP/IP programming this can be a good book. There are some paragraphs here and there with sloppy editing - technical and otherwise - but within tolerable limits. And, that is why I did not give it five stars.

The book is much more about how to design a service than about TCP/IP. If you want detailed explanations about sockets, you will not find them here. But if you want different scenarios to design a service, this is the book for you. The code snippetes are trivial and poorly explained.

The book provides a good conceptual overview of how to do TCP/IP programming but some of the examples are flawed and don't work as the text specifies.