A socket is a communication endpoint. A socket is not directly related to the TCP/IP protocol family, it can be used with any protocol your system supports. The C socket API expects you to first get a blank socket object from the system that you can then either bind to a local socket address (to directly retrieve incoming traffic for connection-less protocols or to accept incoming connection requests for connection-oriented protocols) or that you can connect to a remote socket address (for either kind of protocol). You can even do both if you want to control both, the local socket address a socket is bound to and the remote socket address a socket is connected to. For connection-less protocols connecting a socket is even optional but if you don't do that, you'll have to also pass the destination address with every packet you want to send over the socket as how else would the socket know where to send this data to? Advantage is that you can use a single socket to send packets to different socket addresses. Once you have your socket configured and maybe even connected, consider it to be a bi-directional communication pipe. You can use it to pass data to some destination and some destination can use it to pass data back to you. What you write to a socket is send out and what has been received is available for reading.

Ports on the other hand are something that only certain protocols of the TCP/IP protocol stack have. TCP and UDP packets have ports. A port is just a simple number. The combination of source port and destination port identify a communication channel between two hosts. E.g. you may have a server that shall be both, a simple HTTP server and a simple FTP server. If now a packet arrives for the address of that server, how would it know if that is a packet for the HTTP or the FTP server? Well, it will know so as the HTTP server will run on port 80 and the FTP server on port 21, so if the packet arrives with a destination port 80, it is for the HTTP server and not for the FTP server. Also the packet has a source port since without such a source port, a server could only have one connection to one IP address at a time. The source port makes it possible for a server to distinguish otherwise identical connections: they all have the same destination port, e.g. port 80, the same destination IP (the IP of the server), and the same source IP, as they all come from the same client, but as they have different source ports, the server can distinguish them from each other. And when the server sends back replies, it will do so to the port the request came from, that way the client can also distinguish different replies it receives from the same server.

套接字是软件中的一种结构。它差不多是一个文件;它有读和写这样的操作。它不是一个物理的东西;它是你的软件引用物理事物的一种方式。

端口是一个类似设备的东西。每台主机都有一个或多个网络(这些是物理网络);主机在每个网络上都有一个地址。每个地址可以有数千个端口。

只有一个套接字可能在某个地址上使用某个端口。套接字分配端口类似于为文件系统I/O分配设备。一旦分配了端口，就没有其他套接字可以连接到该端口。当套接字被关闭时，端口将被释放。

看一下TCP/IP术语。

单个端口可以有一个或多个连接不同外部IP的插座，如多个电源插座。

  TCP    192.168.100.2:9001     155.94.246.179:39255   ESTABLISHED     1312
  TCP    192.168.100.2:9001     171.25.193.9:61832     ESTABLISHED     1312
  TCP    192.168.100.2:9001     178.62.199.226:37912   ESTABLISHED     1312
  TCP    192.168.100.2:9001     188.193.64.150:40900   ESTABLISHED     1312
  TCP    192.168.100.2:9001     198.23.194.149:43970   ESTABLISHED     1312
  TCP    192.168.100.2:9001     198.49.73.11:38842     ESTABLISHED     1312

一般来说，你会得到很多理论，但区分这两个概念的最简单方法之一是:

为了获得服务，你需要一个服务号码。这个服务号码称为端口。就这么简单。

例如，HTTP as a service运行在端口80上。

现在，许多人都可以请求该服务，并建立了来自客户机-服务器的连接。会有很多联系。每个连接代表一个客户端。为了维护每个连接，服务器为每个连接创建一个套接字来维护其客户端。

A socket represents a single connection between two network applications. These two applications nominally run on different computers, but sockets can also be used for interprocess communication on a single computer. Applications can create multiple sockets for communicating with each other. Sockets are bidirectional, meaning that either side of the connection is capable of both sending and receiving data. Therefore a socket can be created theoretically at any level of the OSI model from 2 upwards. Programmers often use sockets in network programming, albeit indirectly. Programming libraries like Winsock hide many of the low-level details of socket programming. Sockets have been in widespread use since the early 1980s.

端口表示网络通信的端点或“通道”。端口号允许同一计算机上的不同应用程序在不相互干扰的情况下利用网络资源。端口号最常出现在网络编程中，尤其是套接字编程中。但是，有时端口号对普通用户是可见的。例如，一个人在因特网上访问的一些网站使用如下URL:

http://www.mairie-metz.fr:8080/在本例中，数字8080指Web浏览器连接到Web服务器所使用的端口号。通常，Web站点使用端口号80，该端口号不需要包含在URL中(尽管可以包含)。

在IP组网中，端口号理论上可以在0到65535之间。但是，大多数流行的网络应用程序使用范围较低的端口号(例如HTTP的80)。

注意:术语端口还指网络技术的其他几个方面。端口可以指外部设备的物理连接点，如串口、并口和USB端口。术语端口也指某些以太网连接点，例如集线器、交换机或路由器上的连接点。

ref http://compnetworking.about.com/od/basicnetworkingconcepts/l/bldef_port.htm

ref http://compnetworking.about.com/od/itinformationtechnology/l/bldef_socket.htm

端口和插座可以比作银行分行。

“银行”的门牌号与IP地址类似。 银行有不同的部分，比如:

储蓄帐务部 个人贷款部 房屋贷款部 投诉部门

因此，1(储蓄账户部)、2(个人贷款部)、3(住房贷款部)和4(申诉部)是端口。

现在让我们假设你要开一个储蓄账户，你去了银行(IP地址)，然后你去了“储蓄账户部门”(端口号1)，然后你遇到了在“储蓄账户部门”工作的一名员工。让我们称他为SAVINGACCOUNT_EMPLOYEE1，用于开户。

SAVINGACCOUNT_EMPLOYEE1是套接字描述符，因此可能存在 SAVINGACCOUNT_EMPLOYEE1到SAVINGACCOUNT_EMPLOYEEN。这些都是套接字描述符。

同样地，其他部门将有员工在他们之下工作，他们类似于插座。