Question

what is a socket?

Answer 1

A natural or artificial hollow into which something fits or in which something revolves

Answer 2

socket is an endpoint of a point-to-point communication - like a telephone wall socket. It is a resource dynamically created by the operating system for a process running under its control. For e.g.,for a TCP connection between process P on machine A and Process B machine B, each process will have as socket and the two sockets are connected for a TCP session.

OS calls will support creating a socket, transferring to/from (like writing and reading) a socket, closing a socket. This is similar to OS calls for file support.

Answer 3

Socket is just a place where two bodies communicate(Internet protocol or inter process communication).
If I am right there types of socket
1.Internet socket
2.Local communication socket
3.OS sockets.
In case you want to do socket programming in python,you can look ino my blog
http://kracekumar.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/socket-programming/