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Art of UNIX Programming, The
- By Eric S. Raymond
- Published Sep 23, 2003 by Addison-Wesley Professional. Part of the Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series series.
- Copyright 2004
- Dimensions: 7x9-1/4
- Pages: 560
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-13-142901-9
- ISBN-13: 978-0-13-142901-7
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Product Author Bios
ERIC S. RAYMOND has been a Unix developer since 1982. Known as the resident anthropologist and roving ambassador of the open-source community, he wrote the movement's manifesto in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and is the editor of The New Hacker's Dictionary.
"Reading this book has filled a gap in my education. I feel a sense of completion, understand that UNIX is really a style of community. Now I get it, at least I get it one level deeper than I ever did before. This book came at a perfect moment for me, a moment when I shifted from visualizing programs as things to programs as the shadows cast by communities. From this perspective, Eric makes UNIX make perfect sense."
--Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained, Test Driven Development, and Contributing to Eclipse
"A delightful, fascinating read, and the lessons in problem-solvng are essential to every programmer, on any OS."
--Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++
Writing better software: 30 years of UNIX development wisdom
In this book, five years in the making, the author encapsulates three decades of unwritten, hard-won software engineering wisdom. Raymond brings together for the first time the philosophy, design patterns, tools, culture, and traditions that make UNIX home to the world's best and most innovative software, and shows how these are carried forward in Linux and today's open-source movement. Using examples from leading open-source projects, he shows UNIX and Linux programmers how to apply this wisdom in building software that's more elegant, more portable, more reusable, and longer-lived.
Raymond incorporates commentary from thirteen UNIX pioneers:
- Ken Thompson, the inventor of UNIX.
- Ken Arnold, part of the group that created the 4BSD UNIX releases and co-author of The Java Programming Language.
- Steven M. Bellovin, co-creator of Usenet and co-author of Firewalls and Internet Security.
- Stuart Feldman, a member of the Bell Labs UNIX development group and the author of make and f77.
- Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, principal architects of the X windowing system.
- Steve Johnson, author of yacc and of the Portable C Compiler.
- Brian Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language, The UNIX Programming Environment, The Practice of Programming, and of the awk programming language.
- David Korn, creator of the korn shell and author of The New Korn Shell Command and Programming Language.
- Mike Lesk, a member of the Bell Labs development group and author of the ms macro package, the tbl and refer tools,lex and UUCP.
- Doug McIlroy, Director of the Bell Labs research group where UNIX was born and inventor of the UNIX pipe.
- Marshall Kirk McKusick, developer of the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and a leader of the 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD teams.
- Henry Spencer, a leader among early UNIX developers, who created getopt, the first open-source string library, and a regular-expression engine used in 4.4BSD.
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49 of 56 people found the following review helpful
Highly informative and readable, though very biased,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Art of UNIX Programming (The Addison-Wesley Professional Computng Series) (Paperback)
Raymond does a good job of explaining the philosophy driving the Unix-style of programming. Coming from a background programming Windows, I always thought of the Unix approach (lots of abbreviated command-line utilities, mini-languages, pipes, semi-unstructured text-based process integration) as down-right primitive. However, after reading this book, I've started to understand the philosophy (and the practical reasons) for adopting this approach. I'd definitely recommend this book especially to newbie programmers from the Windows or Mac (pre-OS X) worlds. That said, I do have some criticisms:One of the problems with this book is the overly partisan tone it takes - one gets the impression that absolutely nothing Microsoft has ever done is of value, but the other major desktop PC OSes (Apple, Linux) represent different forms of perfection. (At home, I run Mac OSX, RedHat Linux and Windows, and have a reasonable sense of their relative strengths and weaknesses.) So, be... Read more
48 of 58 people found the following review helpful
Autohagiography with some programming tips,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Art of UNIX Programming (The Addison-Wesley Professional Computng Series) (Paperback)
The writing style of this book tends to hurt the reading experience, as Raymond trumpets his own minor achievments in the free software community. The work feels like it needed one more rewrite before being released to the public: some related sources Raymond hadn't yet read at the time of writing, and some of his advice gets repetitive.The exposition itself is not up to par with The Elements of Programming Style. Raymond tries to give a list of programming rules or principles to follow, but it reads more like a list of slogans that should be taken as axioms. While The Elements of Programming Style itself had a list of rules, the rules were well woven with each other, well defended, and they were used as a means of conveying a larger story. In Raymond's case, he relies upon the slogans in absence of such a story. Thus, the book ends up more like a list of random unrelated tips. Some very profound, like his writings on threads (which he acknowleges Mark M. Miller for his help)... Read more
18 of 20 people found the following review helpful
The patterns of UNIX and how you can use them, By
This review is from: The Art of UNIX Programming (The Addison-Wesley Professional Computng Series) (Paperback)
Even for a primarily Windows programmer, this is a great book to read. He provides a great overview of the Unix design philosophy, its evolution over time, and the things that it still doesn't handle well (user-centered design). He also digs deeper into a lot of the patterns in program organization and coordination to help you choose what to build into a utility, what to expose as a library, and what to package as a set of binaries. There's even a small bit of programming advice from place to place. I'd highly recommend reading the book to at least get a sense of perspective when you're designing your next system. He's right on the mark that the Windows and UNIX worlds have a completely different philosophy on program construction, each with their own merits.His comments about the Windows registry were a bit distressing, though -- not because they're negative, which I consider fine. Rather, it was obvious he'd never used it (comments like "there's no API for it") and it... Read more |
Table of Contents
I. CONTEXT.
II. DESIGN.
III. IMPLEMENTATION.
IV. COMMUNITY.
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