This turned out a bit longer than I expected, so here's the conclusion
Although there was a bit of ramp up time, I found this portion of the project to be a great primer on creating, connecting to and transmitting with sockets.
As far as resources go, I may very well be in the minority in that I didn't find things like Beej's Guide to Network Programming or the Linux Programming Interface to be particularly helpful as a first resource for this exercise. As thorough as they are, they were almost too indepth and I wound up inadvertently complicating things by attempting to apply the patterns in it.
The best resources for me were: