Throughout the years there has been numerous file-sharing networks, some of them free and some of them pay-per-download or some other money making scheme. But none of them has had as big success as Bit torrent.

But what exactly is Bit torrent and how does it work, and maybe even more important, how do I use Bit torrent?

By definition Bit torrent is just a file transfer protocol, and you need a Bit torrent client to take advantage of that file transfer protocol. And there are a lot of Bit torrent clients to choose from, some of them good and some of them not so good, so which one should I use? My advice would be to use one of the most used clients, there is often a good reason why that many users have chosen this client.

My preferred Bit torrent client is BitTornado, which is quite simple to use, and offers pretty good stability on my system. Another popular Bit torrent client who also has a version Mac OSX is Azureus, personally I haven’t tried this client, but there has to be a good reason to its popularity.

Before we get to the nitty gritty details on how to use Bit torrent I want to do a short explanation of how it actually works. Imagine that we have a book and 10 people, I hand each person only few pages from that book. Since I had the whole book to start with and handed out pages to those 10 people I would be what you in Bit torrent terms would call a Seeder, but together the other people I handed pages to also have the whole book.

Then those 10 people can start copying pages from each other until each person has the whole book, even if I have left the room with the only complete copy of the book. Bit torrent works using the same principle, the file being shared is broken up into smaller pieces. And a Tracker keeps track of who has what pieces and helps those looking for pieces to get them and helps those who have the pieces to share them with those who are looking for them.

Will you finally tell me how to use Bit torrent? Yes, I will. The first thing you’ll have to do is make up your mind on what client to use, as I mentioned earlier, I would go for one of the popular ones like BitTornado or Azureus.

When you’ve installed the Bit torrent client of your choice you need to find the files you want to download. Let’s say you want to download a Linux distribution. Head over to the website of that distribution and on the download page of that site you will probably find the alternative “Download with torrent” or something similar.

You will then download a file called mydistroname.torrent, then click to open that .torrent file, the .torrent file will then be opened in your newly installed Bit torrent client, which then will ask you where to save the Linux distribution on your hard drive. Now it’s just to wait for your download to finish :)