"This month my focus is on data communication through
sockets. Sockets are a programming interface developed by
contributors at the University of California at Berkeley in the
1980s. Sockets represent a complete mechanism for establishing
network connections between two end points potentially on different
computers. The end points are created and bound to each other using
the sockets APIs.
Both Linux and Windows sockets interoperate seamlessly, and the
programming challenges in writing a program that compiles on both
systems are not huge."