Chapter 8
Networking Tools

Whether you’re making websites or mobile applications, you’ll probably be doing something with other computers. You’ll want to know how to talk to remote systems, fetch data from APIs, and do some diagnostics to ensure that there are no communication errors.

In this chapter, you’ll use tools to do network detection and diagnostics and access remote sites. You’ll look up IP addresses and domain names, fetch files and make API calls, transfer files between computers, scan networks, and do low-level network communications with netcat.

To follow along with the exercises in this chapter, you’ll need an active Internet connection and an additional computer on your network you can access. I’ll use the virtual machine configured in Chapter 2, ​Creating an Ubuntu Virtual Machine with VirtualBox​, in this chapter.

Let’s get started by exploring information about your computer’s network devices and connection.