sockets

I am in the beginning stages of writing my first socket based php app from scratch. However I think I've quickly picked up a bad coding habbit when reading from sockets. I'm doing the following: //writing the socket socket_write ($socket,"blah blah$CRLF", strlen ($in)); //sleeping for 1 second... sleep(1); //after sleeping, i'll check to see if there is input... $output = socket_read($socket,1024); Can anyone give me a better example of how I should be doing this? I could get events sent back at any time. I tried the example on the php.net's documentation (binding and accepting) but it failed to work for me on the latest php (4.3.0pre2). It just kept timing out for me.