Unix pipes are wonderful because they keep you from having to write intermediate command output to disk (relatively slow) and you don’t need to clean up temporary files afterwards. Once you get the knack, you can string commands together and get a lot of work done with a single line of commands. But there are two types of pipes that you can use when working on a Unix system – regular, unnamed or anonymous pipes and named pipes. These two types of pipes share some advantages, but are used and implemented very differently.

Full article here:
Unix: When pipes get names (ITworld)