Before We look at a little code, if you like would to learn about BSD style sockets in depth then beg, borrow, steal or buy Richard Stevens TCPIP Illustrated series. Expensive but worth every penny. If you would prefer your networking depth served up as Perl; I have recently bought Lincoln Steins 'Networking Programming with Perl' and highly recommend it.

Now here's a little code taken from Lincoln's book. the comments are my own. It is a fragment from a simple daytime client

use Socket;

# declare some self describing constants

use constant DEFAULT_ADDR => '127.0.0.1'; # the local host
use contant  PORT => 13; # well known daytime service port
use constant IPPROTO_TCP => 6; # lets use TCP shall we

# get host from commandline or use default
my $address = shift || DEFAULT_ADDR;

# well IP address is really a 32bit UINT
my $packed_addr = inet_aton($address);
# whoops better include socket/port
my $destination = sockaddr_in(PORT, $packed_addr);

#ok lets put it together get ourselfs a SOKET handle

socket(SOCK,PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP) or die;

# hey man whats the time

connect(SOCK, $destination);

print <SOCK>;

#
## there is a lot of good stuff around the Monasterary on this
##subject, like why it is often not a good idea to use things like 
## print <SOCK> and $line = <SOCK>
#
[download]

Hopefully the above helps. There is lots more if you look around the joint.

mitd-Made in the Dark
'My favourite colour appears to be grey.'