Chapter 2. Domains and Address Families

In the last chapter, you read about the telephone analogy where the caller gets in touch with the other person by dialing that person's telephone number. In the telephone network, each person's telephone number is like a socket address. Sockets have addresses of their own to allow them to be specifically identified. The socket address will be the primary focus of this chapter.

In this chapter you will

• Understand address families

• Learn how to form socket addresses

• Understand the difference between big-endian and little-endian byte ordering

• Learn what an abstract local address is and how to form one

• Learn when socket addresses are not required

This chapter is very important to you because many programmers struggle with this very aspect of socket programming. A little extra effort spent here will reward you later.