Sockets

A full treatment of socket programming is beyond the scope of this book. However, sockets remain an important way that processes or threads can communicate, so it is worth examining the use of sockets for communication within the same system. A particular advantage of using sockets for communication is that scaling beyond a single system becomes a relatively minor change to the code.

The use of sockets is different from other communication mechanisms because the client that opens the socket has different responsibilities than the server connected to the socket. So, it is appropriate to tackle the client and server as two entirely separate applications.