sucking potata
I have been searching for some information as well.
One thing you should definitely do is follow the instructions on the MSDN website on Winsock: LINK
Also, take a look at Beej's Networking Guide (or something similar). He gives a very nice explanation of every step in the Winsock setup. (Information on every function and what not).
I also made a blog post about networking if you wish to read it: BLOG
Regards,
Frostraver
The thing is, unlike a lot of other stuff sockets are very similar in both unix sockets and winsock, winsock is essentially just a windows implementation of the same sockets so the usage of both can be covered pretty well in tutorials. Unlike something like windowing where win32/winapi is rather different from xlib.
Winsock isn't terribly different from BSD sockets. You have to initialize it with and include a header, and close() becomes CloseSocket(), but apart from that they're almost identical.
Since C++ is on a much lower level Socket programming makes use of sockets implemented for each Operating System
Although C++ makes it easier than Java or .NET to work directly with low level C code, generally there is no reason that you should.
However as Khatharr mentioned, the sockets API on most platforms is very similar (Mainly because Winsock was designed based on BSD sockets a long time ago).
This combined with the fact that using the sockets API directly isn't that difficult (i.e not too much boilerplate code required to get quick results) so I probably suggest wrapping your own socket library. I could give you a link to loads of premade socket libraries but personally I dislike using other peoples wrappers for this kind of thing.
Below is a list of simple examples. I use these as a basis for my own netcode.
Winsock
Server - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms737593%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
Client - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms737591%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
POSIX / BSD / UNIX Sockets
Server - http://www.linuxhowtos.org/data/6/server.c
Client - http://www.linuxhowtos.org/data/6/client.c
Of course there is also Boost.Asio if you want to use a pseudo standard library (Akin to .NET and Java sockets).
For UDP, have a look at the simple examples here - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_sockets
When I was creating a network video tutorial series I used Beej's Network Guide and it was quite handy: http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/output/html/singlepage/bgnet.html
you can find lots of example code online to used the usual BSD sockets interface
the very first entry using keywords on yahoo "bsd socket example code c++" was :
http://www.cpp-home.com/tutorials/171_1.htm