Russell Coker wrote in a message to Jim Archer:

RC> I recommend books on UNIX programming, they taught me almost 
RC> everything I needed to know about TCP/IP programming under OS/2.

 JA> There are some very important differences in programming TCP/IP for
 JA> unix and OS/2. The unix book is OK for the general concepts, but some
 JA> aspects are different, most notably error handling and controlling
 JA> blocking. Unfortunatly, I have been unable to find a descent book, in

 RC>    In what way?  I admit I haven't gone very far into TCP/IP
 RC> programming in UNIX, but from what I've seen there's no
 RC> major difference that counts.  The UNIX books are great for
 RC> the theory, and then the IBM doco is satisfactory for
 RC> information on parameters...  The hard part is working out
 RC> the theory, once you've got that there's no major hassle
 RC> with parameters for functions etc. 

Without getting off on a tangent, there is no such thing as a standard Unix
TCP/IP implementation.  You have a common base with a lot of similarity
across platforms, but you also have some really oddball implementations
such as Xenix.  Almost all reference books pick one or another Unix flavor
and describe its interface.  Even Berkeley Unix has fairly radical changes
from one version to the next.

I suppose that what most people mean when they talk about "Unix
TCP/IP" these days is POSIX, and that actually is not so far from
OS/2.  However, Jim is also very right about OS/2 being different,
especially since most Unix is not multi-threaded, and multiple threads are
a natural way to do a lot of the nonsense with TCP/IP that is often handled
in Unix by asynchronous signals and such.  While it is possible to use
TCP/IP on OS/2 in the same general way as Unix, throwing away
multi-threading leads to an architecture that is not optimal.
 
-- Mike


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