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TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3: TCP for Transactions, HTTP, NNTP, and the UNIX® Domain Protocols
- By W. Richard Stevens
- Published Jan 19, 1996 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series series.
- Copyright 1996
- Dimensions: 7-3/8x9-1/4
- Pages: 352
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-201-63495-3
- ISBN-13: 978-0-201-63495-2
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Praised by reviewers and practicing TCP/IP programmers alike, the TCP/IP Illustrated series examines the many facets of the TCP/IP protocol suite using a unique and highly-effective visual approach that describes the inner workings of TCP/IP with detail, insight, and clarity.
Volume 3 provides detailed coverage of four essential topics with which today's TCP/IP programmers and network administrators must be thoroughly familiar:
- T/TCP (TCP for Transactions), an extension to TCP that makes client-server transactions faster, more efficient, and more reliable;
- HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), the foundation for the rapidly expanding World Wide Web;
- NNTP (the Network News Transfer Protocol), the basis for the Usenet news system; and
- UNIX Domain Protocols, a set of protocols used heavily in UNIX implementations.
As in the previous two volumes, the book is filled with examples and implementation details within the 4.4BSD-Lite networking code.
The TCP/IP Illustrated series provides a complete picture of the protocol suite that drives the Internet, and gives programmers, system administrators, and serious users the information, understanding, and skills they need to remain at the forefront of networking technology.
0201634953B04062001
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Good but not as good as the other two, By
This review is from: TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 3: TCP for Transactions, HTTP, NNTP, and the UNIX Domain Protocols (Hardcover)
After having read volumes I & II, I felt compelled to read volume III in spite of other customer reviews here. Having just finished this one, I'm inclined to agree with the other reviewers - interesting, but not as earth-shattering as the first two. The first half of the book covers, in volume-II style detail, an implementation of T/TCP for BSD; although this is interesting, it's not very practical, since T/TCP never caught on in the real world. The next part of the book covers HTTP & NNTP, but doesn't go into much detail; if you know what HTTP & NTTP are, you probably already know all the material covered in this book. Finally, the book ends by examining the BSD implementation of the Unix domain sockets. This last bit was the most relevant part of the book, but don't even think about trying to read this if you haven't completed volume II (and have it handy - the text refers back to specific pages and diagrams from Volume II). If you've read the other two books (Volume II in...
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful
An excellent book supplimenting the first 2!,
By A Customer
This review is from: TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 3: TCP for Transactions, HTTP, NNTP, and the UNIX Domain Protocols (Hardcover)
Like the other two volumes, this book is the definite bible if you are interested in HTTP, T/TCP and UDP. As time passes, these protocols will be used more widely and one will see more people interseted in the book. Similar protocols just start to emerge in areas such as wireless....
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful
A good book, covering rarely explained protocols., By
This review is from: TCP/IP Illustrated, Vol. 3: TCP for Transactions, HTTP, NNTP, and the UNIX Domain Protocols (Hardcover)
This book covers a need distinct from the first two volumes - the first two covered the core protocols' internals, while this one covers the application level protocols - a subject hardly covered by any other book.I've found this book very useful for understanding T/TCP, a subject my teacher did not explain well and was obscure for me. The NNTP & HTTP cover was useful, especially as I was doing a lab on HTTP, but I must admit that as far as HTTP goes the RFCs were sufficient. |
Praise For TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 3: TCP for Transactions, HTTP, NNTP, and the UNIX® Domain Protocols
"There's something new, fresh, and different in the world of Internet protocol suite books. Richard Stevens, noted UNIX guru and author of some of the most well-used books in the TCP/IP-dom, has recently published a third volume (TCP/IP Volume 3) to his excellent TCP/IP Illustrated series."
Preface
Introduction and Organization of the Book
This book is a logical continuation of the TCP/IP Illustrated series: Stevens 1994, which we refer to as Volume 1, and Wright and Stevens 1995, which we refer to as Volume 2.This book is divided into three parts,each covering a different topic:
TCP for transactions, commonly called T/TCP. This is an extension to TCP designed to make client-server transactions faster, more efficient, and reliable. This is done by omitting TCP's three-way handshake at the beginning of a connection and shortening the TIME_WAIT state at the end of a connection. We'll see that T/TCP can match UDP's performance for a client-server transaction and that T/TCP provides reliability and adaptability, both major improvements over UDP.
A transaction is defined to be a client request to a server, followed by the server's reply. (The term transaction does not mean a database transaction, with locking, two-phase commit, and backout.)
TCP/IP applications, specifically HTTP (the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the foundation of the World Wide Web) and NNTP (the Network News Transfer Protocol, the basis for the Usenet news system).
The Unix domain protocols. These protocols are provided by all Unix TCP/IP implementations and on many non-Unix implementations. They provide a form of interprocess communication (IPC) and use the same sockets interface used with TCP/IP. When the client and server are on the same host, the Unix domain protocols are often twice as fast as TCP/IP.
Part 1, the presentation of T/TCP, is in two pieces. Chapters 1-4 describe the protocol and provide numerous examples of how it works. This material is a major expansion of the brief presentation of T/TCP in Section 24.7 of Volume 1. The second piece, Chapters 5-12, describes the actual implementation of T/TCP within the 4.4BSD-Lite networking code (i.e., the code presented in Volume 2). Since the first T/TCP implementation was not released until September 1994, about one year after Volume 1 was published and right as Volume 2 was being completed, the detailed presentation of T/TCP, with examples and all the implementation details, had to wait for another volume in the series.
Part 2, the HTTP and NNTP applications, are a continuation of the TCP/IP applications presented in Chapters 25-30 of Volume 1. In the two years since Volume 1 was published, the popularity of HTTP has grown enormously, as the Internet has exploded, and the use of NNTP has been growing about 75% per year for more than 10 years. HTTP is also a wonderful candidate for T/TCP, given its typical use of TCP: short connections with small amounts of data transferred, where the total time is often dominated by the connection setup and teardown. The heavy use of HTTP (and therefore TCP) on a busy Web server by thousands of different and varied clients also provides a unique opportunity to examine the actual packets at the server (Chapter 14) and look at many features of TCP/IP that were presented in Volumes 1 and 2.
The Unix domain protocols in Part 3 were originally considered for Volume 2 but omitted when its size reached 1200 pages. While it may seem odd to cover protocols other than TCP/IP in a series titled TCP/IP Illustrated, the Unix domain protocols were implemented almost 15 years ago in 4.2BSD alongside the first implementation of BSD TCP/IP. They are used heavily today in any Berkeley-derived kernel, but their use is typically "under the covers," and most users are unaware of their presence. Besides being the foundation for Unix pipes on a Berkeley-derived kernel, another heavy user is the X Window System, when the client and server are on the same host (i.e., on typical workstations). Unix domain sockets are also used to pass descriptors between processes, a powerful technique for interprocess communication. Since the sockets API (application program interface) used with the Unix domain protocols is nearly identical to the sockets API used with TCP/IP, the Unix domain protocols provide an easy way to enhance the performance of local applications with minimal code changes.
Each of the three parts can be read by itself.
Readers
As with the previous two volumes in the series, this volume is intended for anyone wishing to understand how the TCP/IP protocols operate: programmers writing network applications, system administrators responsible for maintaining computer systems and networks utilizing TCP/IP, and users who deal with TCP/IP applications on a daily basis.Parts 1 and 2 assume a basic understanding of how the TCP/IP protocols work. Readers unfamiliar with TCP/IP should consult the first volume in this series, Stevens 1994, for a thorough description of the TCP/IP protocol suite. The first half of Part 1 (Chapters 1-4, the concepts behind T/TCP along with examples) can be read independent of Volume 2, but the remainder of Part 1 (Chapters 5-12, the implementation of T/TCP) assumes familiarity with the 4.4BSD-Lite networking code, as provided with Volume 2.Many forward and backward references are provided throughout the text, to both topics within this text, and to relevant sections of Volumes 1 and 2 for readers interested in more details. A thorough index is provided, and a list of all the acronyms used throughout the text, along with the compound term for the acronym, appears on the inside front covers. The inside back covers contain an alphabetical cross-reference of all the structures, functions, and macros described in the book and the starting page number of the description. This cross-reference also refers to definitions in Volume 2, when that object is referenced from the code in this volume.
Source Code Copyright
All the source code in this book that is taken from the 4.4BSD-Lite release contains the following copyright notice:The routing table code in Chapter 6 contains the following copyright notice:
Acknowledgments
First and foremost I thank my family, Sally, Bill, Ellen, and David, who have endured another book along with all my traveling during the past year. This time, however, it really is a "small" book.I thank the technical reviewers who read the manuscript and provided important feedback on a tight timetable: Sami Boulos, Alan Cox, Tony DeSimone, Pete Haverlock, Chris Heigham, Mukesh Kacker, Brian Kernighan, Art Mellor, Jeff Mogul, Marianne Mueller, Andras Olah, Craig Partridge, Vern Paxson, Keith Sklower, Ian Lance Taylor, and Gary Wright. A special thanks to the consulting editor, Brian Kernighan, for his rapid, thorough, and helpful reviews throughout the course of the book, and for his continued encouragement and support.
Special thanks are also due Vern Paxson and Andras Olah for their incredibly detailed reviews of the entire manuscript, finding many errors and providing valuable technical suggestions. My thanks also to Vern Paxson for making available his software for analyzing Tcpdump traces, and to Andras Olah for his help with T/TCP over the past year. My thanks also to Bob Braden, the designer of T/TCP, who provided the reference source code implementation on which Part 1 of this book is based.
Others helped in significant ways. Gary Wright and Jim Hogue provided the system on which the data for Chapter 14 was collected. Doug Schmidt provided a copy of the public domain TTCP program that uses Unix domain sockets, for the timing measurements in Chapter 16. Craig Partridge provided a copy of the RDP source code to examine. Mike Karels answered lots of questions.
My thanks once again to the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO), Sidney Wolff, Richard Wolff, and Steve Grandi, for providing access to their networks and hosts.
Finally, my thanks to all the staff at Addison-Wesley, who have helped over the past years, especially my editor John Wait.
As usual, camera-ready copy of the book was produced by the author, a Troff die-hard, using the Groff package written by James Clark. I welcome electronic mail from any readers with comments, suggestions, or bug fixes.
W. Richard Stevens
rstevens@noao.edu
http://www.noao.edu/~rstevens
Tucson, Arizona
November 1995
0201634953P04062001
Table of Contents
(Most chapters open with "Introduction" and conclude with "Summary".)
Preface.
I. TCP FOR TRANSACTIONS.
II. ADDITIONAL TCP APPLICATIONS.
III. THE UNIX DOMAIN PROTOCOLS.
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