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Loading... The Art of UNIX Programming (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)by Eric S. Raymond
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  dvf1976 | Apr 23, 2008 |  An excellent review of Unic culture. Why is this necessary? Because software engineering is not mature, good practice is a cultural thing, not like more mature branches of engineering, where you can learn it from a book. Raymond argues (persuasively) that Unix culture is good because it persists nearly 40 years after it was written. I still write command line programs, though my collegues shake their heads. Read Neal Stephenson's essay "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" as well, it contains many good points. Raymond lets his personality shine through in this book. I find him irritating (as a person), and his opinions are not always what I would hope, but on balance he has written an excellent book. He can on occasion write some terrible code, I should know, I have had to subvert it to other uses, so he is not a god, just a mildly priviledged bystander to an interestin era in the development of technology. (  )1  celephicus | Mar 1, 2008 | FallenPegasus | Jan 22, 2007 | States some critical Unix themes, most importantly: Single Point of Truth. ie each fact or configuration is in one place and one place only. The reprecussions of breaking it are obvious, but most OS vendors do it here and there. (  ) jolomo | Jul 1, 2006 |  no reviews | add a review
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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.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:57:52 -0400)
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I'm no master, but the advice in this book seems sound.
Plus, it gives me some basis for inevitable technical arguments that I occasionally get into. (