What's Next
The beginning of this chapter might have been review to some, but perhaps new to you. However, you can see now that this topic was important to cover, because the makeup of IP numbers and their classification plays quite a large role when working with IP addresses. You also learned about private IP number ranges, which might help you set up your own network.
One example program was described early in this chapter, which classified IP numbers. From this example, you learned how this can be done. However, toward the end of this chapter, you also learned that you do not always have to do this yourself. The functions inet_lnaof(3) and inet_netof(3) were able to do this for you and extract the parts that you were interested in.
The remainder of this chapter dealt with conversion from strings to addresses, and addresses back to strings. These are important functions for the network application designer to know. These functions ease your workload and provide reliability and consistency. This is accomplished by having these operations done in the same manner in each program that they are used in.
The next chapter will introduce you to socket types and protocols. With this knowledge, you will learn how to create sockets to match your networking needs using the socket(2) function call.