instantaneous audio streaming

Hi there,

I was wondering if anyone out there might know of any good
references/books/journals etc on what is involved in audio streaming..

I am programming an application where I synthesize a particular audio
sound. I was able to precompute everything and then dump out the audio
file. 

However I now woudl like to compute the audio file "on the fly" and have a
 streamed output.  Computation takes less than a second, but I guess its
the question of how fast it can be output to the sound card

Anyways, I really need a primer on how audio is streamed on a computer
before i go about figuring out how to program this.. 

So if anyone knows of any references offhand, that would be great. (btw I
am programming with c++ on a Fedora machine)

Thanks very much,
Louis