It is also referred to as the Application Programming Interface (API) between the application and the network, since the socket is the programming interface with which network applications are built. The application developer has control of everything on the application-layer side of the socket but has little control of the transport-layer side of the socket. The only control that the application developer has on the transport-layer side is (1) the choice of transport protocol and (2) perhaps the ability to fix a few transport-layer parameters such as maximum buffer and maximum segment sizes (to be covered in Chapter 3). Once the application developer chooses a transport protocol (if a choice is available), the application is built using the transport-layer services provided by that protocol. We’ll explore sockets in some detail in Section 2.7.and 2.8.