Re:netcat has cousins (Score 1)

ssh (at least OpenSSH) uses the same algorithm as gzip.

You could also use the 'z' option to tar, which also uses gzip to compress/uncompress tar files.

An even easier (and more portable) variant would be to use:

scp -C -r sourceDir 'me@host:destinationDir'

thereby bypassing the overhead of tar. Only a fast link (+100M), you could probably get better performance by skipping the compression (too much overhead). This only shows why this book is over-rated!