A network socket is an endpoint of a connection across a computer network. Today, most communication between computers is based on the Internet Protocol; therefore most network sockets are Internet sockets. More precisely, a socket is a handle (abstract reference) that a local program can pass to the networking application programming interface (API) to use the connection, for example "send this data on this socket". Sockets are internally often simply integers, which identify which connection to use.

For example, to send "Hello, world!" via TCP to port 80 of the host with address 1.2.3.4, one might get a socket, connect it to the remote host, send the string, then close the socket:

A socket API is an application programming interface (API), usually provided by the operating system, that allows application programs to control and use network sockets. Internet socket APIs are usually based on the Berkeley sockets standard. In the Berkeley sockets standard, sockets are a form of file descriptor (a file handle), due to the Unix philosophy that "everything is a file", and the analogies between sockets and files: you can read, write, open, and close both. In practice the differences mean the analogy is strained, and one instead use different interfaces (send and receive) on a socket. In inter-process communication, each end will generally have its own socket, but these may use different APIs: they are abstracted by the network protocol.