Introduction to Winsock
This chapter is dedicated to learning the basic techniques for writing successful Winsock applications.
Winsock is a standard application programming interface (API) that allows two or more applications (or processes) to communicate either on the same machine or across a network and is primarily designed to foster data communication over a network.
It is important to understand that Winsock is a network programming interface and not a protocol.
Winsock provides the programming interface for applications to communicate using popular network protocols such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) and Internetwork Packet Exchange (IPX).
The Winsock interface inherits a great deal from the BSD Sockets implementation on UNIX platforms.
In Windows environments, the interface has evolved into a truly protocol-independent interface, especially with the release of Winsock 2.