Two questions

Hello all, I would like to learn two things and am uncertain where to look; so I thought I would write. 1. Where would one suggest looking to learn better how parse-partial-sexp works? In my opinion, that section of the elisp reference manual is too short. In my hunting through the xemacs-packages, I found many examples of parse-partial-sexp in use, but was never able to properly understand what was going on. 2. What do I need to do in order to work with sockets and/or character special files in elisp? I would love to be able to call ioctl(). I was hunting through lstream.h but have so far come up empty. Thank you for your time, -Trey Belew