It is not intended for WinSock programmers, or for Perl, Java, etc. I have nothing against Windows or Perl, but I had to limit the scope of the FAQ for the first draft. In the future, I would really like to provide examples for Perl, Java, and maybe others. Coverage of other types of sockets may be added later. Different kinds of sockets have different properties.
Sockets are either connection-oriented or connectionless.
There are also different socket families. The implementation is left up to the vendor of your particular unix, but from the point of view of the programmer, connection-oriented sockets work a lot like files, or pipes. If this happens, then you will have to make a second call for the rest of the data. There are examples of this in the source code that accompanies the faq . Here is a list of the places I know to get source code for network programming books.