Endianness

C++ General: What do 'ntohl()/ntohs()' and 'htonl()/htons()' actually do?
This family of functions convert between host byte order and network byte order. These functions should not be used when one simply wants to change endian-ness in a platform independent way.

C++ General: How do I convert between big-endian and little-endian values?

CodeProject: Basic concepts on Endianness