I am very new to programming, and have had no formal training in it before so please bear with me if this is a vague question.
I was just curious: how do different programs on the same computer communicate with each other? From my programming experience I believe it can be achieved by socket programming? 
Thanks
Sockets, shared memory, events / signals, pipes, semaphores, message queues, mailslots. Just search the Internet for either.
Communicating between applications?