IRC (Internet Relay Chat) may very well turn out to be the world's most
successful hack. In 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen wrote the original IRC
program at the University of Oulu, Finland. As he says in his foreword,
"IRC started as one summer trainee's programming exercise. A hack grew
into a software development project that hundreds of people participated
in, and then became a worldwide environment where tens of thousands of
people now spend time with each other. I have found many of my friends
through IRC and learnt a significant part of my present software
engineering knowledge while using and working with IRC. That would not
have been possible without learning from code examples and hacks from
others".IRC has continued to grow in popularity since its inception.
Millions of people from all over the world now use IRC to chat with
friends, discuss projects and collaborate on research. With a simple,
clearly defined protocol, IRC has become one of the most accessible chat
environments, with clients written for a multitude of operating systems.
And IRC is more than just a simple chat system it is a network of
intercommunicating servers, allowing thousands of clients to connect
from anywhere in the world using the IRC protocol.While IRC is easy to
get into and many people are happy to use it without being aware of
what's happening under the hood, there are those who hunger for more
knowledge, and this book is for them. IRC Hacks is a collection of
tips and tools that cover just about everything needed to become a true
IRC master, featuring contributions from some of the most renowned IRC
hackers, many of whom collaborated on IRC, grouping together to form the
channel #irchacks on the freenode IRC network (irc.freenode.net).Like
all of our Hacks books, there are many different ways to use IRC
Hacks. You can read the book from cover to cover, but you might be
better served by picking an interesting item from the table of contents
and just diving in.If you're relatively new to IRC, you should
considering starting with a few hacks from each progressive chapter.
Chapter 1 starts you off by showing you how to connect to IRC, while
Chapter 2 acquaints you with the everyday concepts you'll need to use
IRC effectively. Chapter 3 is all about users and channels, and
introduces the first pieces of code. Chapter 4 shows you how to make
useful enhancements to IRC clients.Chapter 5 is where you will learn the
basics about creating IRC bots, with Chapters 6-12 introducing more
complex bots that can be used for logging, servicing communities,
searching, announcing, networking, managing channels or simply for
having fun. Chapter 13 delves into the IRC protocol in more detail, and
Chapter 14 demonstrates some interesting alternative methods for
connecting to IRC. Finally, Chapter 15 will move you on to new pastures
by showing you how to set up your own IRC server.This book presents an
opportunity to learn how IRC works and how to make best use of some of
the features that have made it the most successful, most scalable, and
most mature chat system on this planet. IRC Hacks delves deep into the
possibilities.
