Network Programming with Perl (1st edition)

/Network Programming with Perl/ is a comprehensive, example-rich guide to creating network-based applications using the Perl programming language. Among its many capabilities, modern Perl provides a straightforward and powerful interface to TCP/IP, and this book shows you how to leverage these capabilities to create robust, maintainable, and efficient custom client/server applications. The book quickly moves beyond the basics to focus on high-level, application programming concepts, tools, and techniques. Readers will find a review of basic networking concepts and Perl fundamentals, including Perl's I/O functions, process model, and object-oriented extensions. In addition, the book examines a collection of the best third-party modules in the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, including existing network protocols for e-mail, news, and the Web. The core of the book focuses on methods and alternatives for designing TCP-based client/server systems and more advanced techniques for specialized applications. Specific topics covered include: * The Berkeley Sockets API * The TCP protocol and the IO::Socket API * FTP filesharing service * The Net::Telnet module for adapting clients to interactive network services * SMTP, including how to create and send e-mails with multimedia attachments * POP, IMAP, and NNTP for receiving and processing e-mail * HTTP and the LWP module for communicating with Web servers * Forking servers and the UNIX and Windows inetd daemons * Perl's experimental multithreaded API * Multiplexed operations and nonblocking I/O * Bulletproofing servers * TCP urgent data * UDP protocol and servers * Broadcasting and multicasting * Interprocess communication with UNIX-domain sockets Useful, working programs demonstrate ideas and techniques in action, including a real-time chat and messaging system, a program for processing e-mail containing MIME attachments, a program for mirroring an FTP site, and a Web robot. /Network Programming with Perl/ focuses on TCP/IP rather than just the common Web protocols. Modeled after the critically acclaimed /TCP/IP Illustrated/ by W. Richard Stevens, this book achieves a level of detail far superior to most. It is an essential resource for network administrators and Perl programmers who are creating network applications.