Next steps

In this chapter, we took a deep dive into networking. We broke out of the confines of the local machine and looked at all the good stuff that the BCL gives us when it comes to connecting to the outside world.

We looked at default protocols such as HTTP, FTP, and SMTP. We also looked at sockets in case the predefined protocols are not good enough, such as when you want to look up the current time from a time server. We dove into asynchronous networking and talked a lot about performance and making our networking error-proof and more robust.

Let’s be honest: almost no computer these days runs on its own. Most machines and thus the software running on them, are somehow connected to the outside world. Especially the things we as system programmers are interested in are not used by users, but instead by other software. Some of that software lives on other machines. This means it is imperative you know about networking. And now you do!

We did not talk about security...