I'm a lazy college kid and don't feel like leaving my room most of the time. I'm only a freshman so I don't have a car. Buying a book on winsock would require a VERY painful two hours of bussing myself all over town to find a book. Anyways... I figure if I bought a winsock library, I would get the documentation with it telling me everything my heart desires. Now... I'll detail what I am programming so you kind folks out there may direct me on what I should be looking for. I've never programmed with winsock or anything to do with networking before. I am trying to create a server that will accept connections from multiple game servers. It will take an encrypted password( that's also something I've never dealt with and it will likely come at a later stage ), decrypt it, and determine if it's correct. Once it determines that the password is correct, it will open up a connection with a MySQL server, dumping or retrieving a bunch of statistics. My logic behind using winsock is that I would have to write an intermediate program between the game server and the database to deal with the encryption. Not sure though. Any help is appreciated GREATLY. Thank you, Mike Whitfield

Try Raknet. It's free and very powerful.

Quote:

require a VERY painful two hours of bussing myself all over town to find a book.

there's always Amazon, you know ;) But, as Promit suggested, there are several free networking libraries that will probably do just fine by you.

Wow! Thank you for that quick response! Uhhh... is an intermediate server even the most appropriate thing?

Btw... I don't want to wait days and days for a book. :P

You could have it tomorrow if you ordered it this morning :) If it's in stock. Never really heard of a good, lazy programmer. Kind of an oxymoron I guess.

Quote:

Original post by Mike2343 Never really heard of a good, lazy programmer. Kind of an oxymoron I guess.

A famous quote goes like "The best programmers are lazy".
Basically, they work hard to produce a reusable piece of software to avoid the real tedious, repetetive stuff. That's what I call productive lazyness. [grin]

Oh believe me, I work like a slave. I just don't like physically moving even though it's a nice day out. I've worked with too many poorly documented APIs to be called a poor programmer.

WinSock itself is well documented on MSDN Online; no purchase necessary.

The Forum FAQ has a lot of pointers for people who want to get into network game programming, too, most of which are free resources.