744: Mainline

Of course, what you have learned about sockets in this chapter is just the beginning. There are many alternatives to the kind of socket communication outlined here:

• You may want to connect a server to a client on the same machine. You can actually run the server and client programs shown in this chapter on one machine, as is, but there are alternative ways to write such programs that do not require you to provide an Internet address.
• You may want to supply a symbolic Internet address, such as ai.mit.edu, rather than a numeric Internet address, such as 128.52.36.4.
• You may want to have one server supply information to many clients, so that the server continues to do its job even if one of the clients crashes.

To learn how to implement such socket programs, you should explore a book on network programming.