As is quite appropriate, the first experiments in the book call for modifications to programs available from Purdue University. The directions for obtaining the software are found on page 20. Your instructor may obtain the programs and make them available to you.

Experiment 5.1 requires you to compile and test an echo client. It is possible that the procedure will not be completely transparent to some students (it takes a few minutes thought to see how things are organized), but detailed directions are to be found on the page for this experiment. The Optional Extensions are interesting and are not difficult. I would encourage you to perform further experiments such as the one described on the page. "Odd" behavior is interesting, and you can learn a lot by persuing explanations.

Experiment 5.2 requires adding some features. This requires familiarity with the basic string handling functions in C. The first Optional Extension is of great interest. The comment that "Sending the remote user's name with each line of text wastes network bandwidth" is of special interest. Why worry about 6 bytes? It is the principle! Watch out for the second Optional Extension. It is, in my opinion, extremely difficult. See the page for this experiment for details. As best as I can tell at the moment (I plan to come back to this one once I am further along), changing the terminal settings require modification to the library code provided. Nasty, but challenging.

Experiment 5.3 introduces the student to file transfer. This idea will appear again in Experiment 6.3, and then again in Expriments 8.3 and 8.4.