The best place to begin when learning about the tcpsocket type is building a simple client program. In this chapter we will examine the code that is used for a basic URL dumping program. It makes a connection to a web server and requests a resource using the GET method of the HTTP protocol. For details of how to program HTTP-compliant applications, the reader is directed to the various RFC's that are associated with this protocol (starting with RFC1945).

Tip

One of the more useful tools when building any type of TCP/IP-based service is the program telnet. Telnet provides a console with which the user can examine what is going on when a server connection is made and then can test the interaction with the server. Regardless of whether the objective is to build a server or a client, it is always useful to have a console available with which to test the interaction of the target components.