Product Description

The Art of UNIX Programming poses the belief that understanding the unwritten UNIX engineering tradition and mastering its design patterns will help programmers of all stripes to become better programmers. This book attempts to capture the engineering wisdom and design philosophy of the UNIX, Linux, and Open Source software development community as it has evolved over the past three decades, and as it is applied today by the most experienced programmers. Eric Raymond offers the next generation of "hackers" the unique opportunity to learn the connection between UNIX philosophy and practice through careful case studies of the very best UNIX/Linux programs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #363285 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 560 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780131429017
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Unix ranks among the great engineering accomplishments of the last half of the twentieth century, and its heir--Linux--seems already imposing and still on its way to achieving its full potential. Eric S. Raymond argues in The Art of UNIX Programming that the excellence of Unix derives as much from the fact that it was (and continues to be) a community effort as from the fact that a lot of smart people have worked to design and build it. Raymond, best known as the author of the open-source manifesto The Cathedral and the Bazaar, says in his preface that this is a "why-to" book, rather than a "how-to" book. It aims to show new Unix programmers why they should work under the old "hacker ethic"--embracing the principles of good software design for its own sake and of code-sharing.

That said, a great deal of valuable practical information appears in this book. Very little of it is in the form of code; most of the practical material takes the form of case studies and discussions of aspects of Unix, all aimed at determining why particular design characteristics are good. In many cases, the people who did the work in the first place make guest appearances and explain their thinking--an invaluable resource. This book is for the deep-thinking software developer in Unix (and perhaps Linux in particular). It shows how to fit into the long and noble tradition, and how to make the software work right. --David Wall

Topics covered: Why Unix (the term being defined to include Linux) is the way it is, and the people who made it that way. Commentary from Ken Thompson, Steve Johnson, Brian Kernighan, and David Korn enables readers to understand the thought processes of the creators of Unix.

From the Back Cover

"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.

About the Author

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.

Customer Reviews

Highly informative and readable, though very biased
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 warned: Art of Unix Programming paints a one sided picture. The author is a well-known figure in the open source community, one of its fiercest advocates, and one of Microsoft's most vocal critics, so it might seem to strange to wish for less anti-Microsoft spin from this source. After all, the Raymond brand certainly carries with it an obligatory expectation of Windows-bashing, doesn't it?

One of the only Windows design decision which Raymond doesn't condemn is the (now discontinued) .ini file format. Even the thorough-going support for object-orientation in Windows is given short-shrift: after explaining the many horrors of object-oriented programming (according to Raymond), Unix-programmers are praised as "tend[ing] to share an instinctive sense of these problems." This section (http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/unix_and_oo.html) is particularly illustrative of the one-sided approach that Raymond takes.

Art of Unix Programming is really an excellent and informative book which could have been substantially better with a little balanced discussion. I found myself constantly second-guessing the author: Is he arguing such-and-such a point on the merits or because he simply loves UNIX & hates Microsoft so much? While the book does a great job of articulating and illustrating the UNIX idiom, it's a shame that the reading experience is marred by mistrust. If he hadn't been so blindly anti-Microsoft, we'd be able to more confidently rely on his conclusions, and the text would be not merely highly informative (as it is), but definitive (as it is not). Four stars, therefore, instead of five.

PS: You can find this book on-line with Google - no charge.

The patterns of UNIX and how you can use them
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 was also clear that he hadn't even bothered to research why it existed and what problems it was intended to solve. The comments were typical of what I'd expect of a Slashdot troll, but not of a bright, respectable person like ESR. I've programmed on both platforms extensively and only comment on what I have first-hand experience and knowledge of; I'd expect him to do the no less, especially as an author.

It was also curious that several times he implied unit testing == XP == agile software development. For as tuned in as he seems to be to methodolgy work, missing the forest for a single leaf is a bit embarrassing.

an interesting and often annoying read...
I suppose any book containing so many interesting quotes from so many UNIX luminaries cannot be overlooked. (I wonder if any of them would have co-authored this) It also happens to contain a great many topics that are well-worth writing about; My only wish is that someone less in awe with the contents of his own field of vision, and with greater depth and objectivity (not to mention humility) had the opportunity to write this book.

Quality of discussion is varied as expected; Raymond is not quite the UNIX expert he thinks he is. In places, Raymond's tone encourages one to throw the book at the nearest wall and go out just to get some fresh air; He is condescending, hectoring, lecturing, and sometimes just misleading. Alas, I will still recommend it as worth reading (check your local library) with a nice grain of salt; just enough friction for thought is provided in this edition.