套接字基本上是网络通信的端点，至少由一个ip地址和一个端口组成。在Java/ c#中，套接字是双向连接一侧的高级实现。

还有Java教程中的一个(非规范的)定义。

套接字由三部分组成:

IP地址 传输协议 端口号

端口是1到65535之间的数字，表示设备中的逻辑门。 客户端和服务器之间的每个连接都需要一个惟一的套接字。

例如:

1030为端口。 (10.1.1.2, TCP，端口1030)是一个套接字。

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.

相对的TCP/IP术语，我认为这是隐含的问题。通俗地说:

PORT类似于特定邮政编码中特定房屋的电话号码。城镇的邮政编码可以被认为是城镇和城镇中所有房屋的IP地址。

另一方面，SOCKET更像是一对房屋之间的电话之间的通话。这些呼叫可以在同一城镇的房屋之间建立，也可以在不同城镇的两所房屋之间建立。这对手机之间建立的临时通道就是SOCKET。

尽可能简单地说，套接字和端口之间没有物理区别，例如PATA和SATA之间的区别。它们只是一些读写网卡的软件。

A port is essentially a public socket, some of which are well-known/well-accepted, the usual example being 80, dedicated to HTTP. Anyone who wants to exchange traffic using a certain protocol, HTTP in this instance, canonically goes to port 80. Of course, 80 is not physically dedicated to HTTP (it's not physically anything, it's just a number, a logical value), and could be used on some particular machine for some other protocol ad libitum, as long as those attempting to connect know which protocol (which could be quite private) to use.

套接字本质上是一个私有端口，为连接方知道但其他人不一定知道的特定目的而建立。底层传输层通常是TCP或UDP，但也不一定非得如此。最基本的特征是两端都知道发生了什么，不管发生了什么。

这里的关键是，当在某个端口上接收到连接请求时，应答握手包括有关为服务特定请求者而创建的套接字的信息。后续通信通过该(私有)套接字连接进行，而不是服务继续侦听连接请求的公共端口连接。

套接字基本上是网络通信的端点，至少由一个ip地址和一个端口组成。在Java/ c#中，套接字是双向连接一侧的高级实现。

还有Java教程中的一个(非规范的)定义。