Ebook: TCP/IP Sockets in C, Second Edition: Practical Guide for Programmers (The Morgan Kaufmann Practical Guides Series)

This book includes enough easy to read explanations of actual working code that you can within a few hours have a client/server socket connection up and working. Both the text and the code are well written and easy to follow. Advanced information about non-blocking I/O allowed me to quickly implement background socket reads without tying up a foreground process. The annoying occurrences of "address already in use" errors is explained clearly, and how to get around them by the use of socket options. I had literally zero problems compiling and executing the examples with the gcc compiler and Ubuntu Linux.
As the title says, it's a book for C programmers about sockets, not for other languages. There is a chapter on C++ use, which I have not needed yet.