6.1. Overview
TCP provides an interface to network communications that is radically different from the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) discussed in Chapter 5. The properties of TCP make it highly attractive to network programmers, as it simplifies network communication by removing many of the obstacles of UDP, such as ordering of packets and packet loss. While UDP is concerned with the transmission of packets of data, TCP focuses instead on establishing a network connection, through which a stream of bytes may be sent and received.
In Chapter 5 we saw that packets may be sent through a network using various paths and may arrive at different times. This benefits performance and robustness, as the loss of a single packet doesn't necessarily disrupt ...
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