What is a socket in network programming?

I have been working extensively with networked applications the past week or so, and wanted to share a little bit to information about sockets. If you are developing network applications, you will often encounter the this term.

A socket is an endpoint for network communication between two applications. For example like this:

Application > Socket > TCP/IP > Network

Applications create sockets to send and receive data over TCP/IP networks. For instance, a web browser connects to a web server using a TCP socket.

Each socket is identified by an IP address and port number. Sockets are provided through APIs such as WinSock on Windows.