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The "IRC" Lesson is part of the full, Networking and Streams course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:

James introduces Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a text-based chat protocol that is still very popular among programmers.

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Transcript from the "IRC" Lesson

[00:00:00]
>> Another fun text-based protocol to experiment with, is IRC. This is one that you can try yourself, if you know the name of a public IRC server. So, if we wanna connect to freenode, can follow this procedure, so, I don't know how many connections the node will let us get away with, but whatever, I'll just try it and see.

[00:00:27]
So here, we're connected now to irc.freenode.net on the pseudo default IRC port of 666, [SOUND], three sixes and a seven. Then to kind of set yourself a nickname on IRC which is, again, a sort of old chat program. You can do nick. Call it, Gave myself a nickname, timed out.

[00:01:04]
And then you need to specify user as well. And once you do that, now you can join a channel. So I'm gonna join the cyberwizard channel, and I can see a message, And now, if I actually hop on, so I'm already in that channel in my IRC client on my server, so I can just make sure that it worked.

[00:01:46]
Indeed, that's me, right there. And I just posted this message from Netcat, onto this chat protocol, just by knowing how the chat protocol works. And now, I can also talk to myself, and I see the message over here. The way that the message is reformatted, is you get these lines that are sort of the hostname, I guess that's our IP address right now, in this building, then you get this keyword PRIVMSG, the channel, and colon, and then the message.

[00:02:19]
So, I told myself, hello, and now I can say back. I say, bye. As you can see on the left, it was sent successfully and I can, great so, if you wanna play around with another text based protocol, this one's pretty fun. You can hop in the cyberwizard channel on freenode and poke around.

[00:02:45]
Again, there are many commands, but here's just a few of them that you can use to basically just have some fun. So why don't we give everyone a little bit of time to poke around. Hopefully you can all hop on IRC with Netcat. Let's see how many of you can get on at the same time, [LAUGH] before we hit a limit.

[00:03:09]
If you could say something on the cyberwizard channel, then I'll leave this up on the screen, so we can all see it. That'd be kinda fun.

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