The Art of UNIX Programming

Rating:
Summary: Does better at expanding your mind than herbal Zen :-)
Review: This book is required reading for anyone involved in any form of Open Source IT. It's wisdom right up there with the The Cathedraland the Bazaar, RMS's GNU GPL, and any bantering quotes you get from Linus himself. With his book, Eric Raymond, has attempted and come amazingly close to the impossible dream of capturing the logic and natural beauty of the UNIX community/philosophy. Eric has already discussed the ramifications of UNIX/Linux's ever changing and complex structure; in both the applications, coding, and social sense . As Linus once said "The best analogy is biological diversity. You have the Linux approach that is fairly diverse and all over the map. Maybe it is not very efficient. But it works very well in the face of complexity and changing circumstances." The Art of UNIX Programming takes a very accurate overview snapshot of what UNIX means right now. Although Eric is not intensionally a "big picture" kind of guy he has painstakingly gathered all relevant information while filtering out the garbage. Every UNIX programmer secretly longs to know what Eric has so benevolently written in this book through experience. They just may not know it yet.

Of course there are some stances he takes trying too hard to go for the "big picture". Such as the already mentioned renouncement of the Object Oriented approach. But it's not a total renouncement, and the left over renouncement is for good reason on if taken on the surface. What he means is that it is better to create a small tool in a scripting language and then do the Object Orientation through pipes for example: ps -A | grep bash | less. That's like calling upon objects less(grep(ps(A), "bash")), as functions; whatever you wanna call it, if it has encapsulation inheritance polymorphism then it's OO by definition. Eric would like to live in a world with many small tools (or libraries if you will) that when combined can create something much larger in scope. The argument is akin to something like an automotive factory assembly line. However, when taken to far it's akin to a one hundred thousand monkeys writing on one hundred thousand typewriters... and you know the rest and that'll never happen. I guess it all depends on if your building off of an axle of modularity or monkeys.

Anyway, buy this book and you'll have no end of geeky philosophy to argue about.

Rating:
Summary: Appropriately good, considering the author
Review: This book is written by Eric S. Raymond, who wrote ncurses and a large part of GNU Emacs, and thus one should expect a large amount of Unix and GNU bias. I don't think either are inappropriately placed, especially in a book like this. Raymond covers just about every topic that applies to the "tranditional" Unix programmer, from a historical as well as contemporary perspective, and offers a large amount of insight into each topic.

For someone moving new Unix, wishing to understand its origins and design philisophy, or for anyone developing on Unix (especially traditional development, i.e. C or C++) this book is highly applicable. The book is very readable; it's less of a technical book and more of an open discussion of past and current development practices.

If you the have the opportunity, I highly recommend you have a look at the "Origins of Unix" chapter; Raymond was there for most of Unix's history, and he recounts it vividly. This was the most entertaining and informative chapter of the book, especially for someone who is new to the Unix community. His discussions of transparency and modularity were also very practical and useful.

Rating:
Summary: Has he ever used unix?
Review: This book isn't about unix programming, its about the authors idea of linux programming. I will teach you bad habits and how to make non-portable linuxware. Do the unix world a favor, and skip this one.

Rating:
Summary: A Spectacular Book
Review: This is a really great book, 30 pages into it I had already begun raving about it to my peers. It takes the reader through years of Unix history, philosophy, application, and wisdom. It starts out slowly, explaining how an operating system can create and sustain any sort of culture. It admits the flaws in Unix and highlights it's strengths and successes. It then gets into the "Rules" of Unix Philosophy, which was something that was greatly beneficial to me in my coding life. It teaches the reader to make things modular and simple, not try to redo things that have been done before, not to be overly clever, etc.

Throughout this book the reader is given examples of some of the most basic things in the unix world, why text is so important, what "transparency" is when referring to coding, and it even includes a non-bias section reviewing some standard unix text editors. The book also gets into evaluating various languages in unix, including which is most appropriate for certain projects, which can be very helpful to someone looking to learn a programming language but who is unsure of which direction to take. A whole huge section of this book gets into the community of unix, standards, documentation, licensing, and the actual personal community.

The most thrilling part of this book for me was the History of Unix, hackers and the open srouce movement. As a history buff I always tend to be drawn to such things, and I believe he did a very good job and kept me enthralled. I also enjoyed Appendix D: Rootless Root: The Unix Koans of Master Foo, it was quite witty and amusing, as well as full of great lessons.

A wonderful computer book suitable for any sort of computer buff, even if they aren't currently working directly with Unix. It's easy to skip around this book by scanning the contents to just see what you're interested in, I really believe there is something for every computer enthusist, I am surprised a book like this hadn't been written sooner.

Rating:
Summary: Indispensable guide to Unix history, culture and principles
Review: This is a wonderful book. As far as I know, it is one of a kind in its scope and concerns. It put many aspects of computing in perspective for me and deepened my appreciation for Unix, as a technology, social phenomenon...and attitude. It is instructive and useful to compare and contrast the outlook presented in this book with those of major corporate players, such as IBM and Microsoft.

Rating:
Summary: All software developers MUST read this book
Review: This is an excellent book. I especially enjoyed reading the Design chapters, which
describe how to architect software in the Unix tradition. This is indispensable reading for ALL developers, not just Unix ones.

Eric Raymond's writing is very clear, concise, transparent, and easy to read, just like the Unix coding and design styles he advocates.

This book contains almost no source code, but talks about Unix culture, tools, design & implementation methods at a much higher level. All points are followed by interesting use cases, which cover existing Unix features and applications. The book is a very comprehensive and in-depth look at the Unix world.

If you enjoyed reading this book online like me, please support the author & order a hardcopy.

Rating:
Summary: a brilliant explanation of the success of Unix & friends
Review: This is an excellent explanation of how & why Unix and the ideas behind it have endured so well over 3 decades, while other systems have gone the way of the dinosaurs.

I've been in the Unix field on and off for 20 years and was amazed at how much I learnt from this book. It makNot only that, butes so many things clear that were unconscious to me and probably many others.

It also explains how to use these ideas to improve software projects, whether under Unix, Open Source, or even proprietary systems. With the current Linux explosion, it's great to find out how to use the same principles for other projects.

I believe that every programmer, whether working with Unix, Windows or other systems, should read this book at least once.

Rating:
Summary: A Great Read
Review: To extend the author's idea:

Any book should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great book lends itself to uses you never expected.

This is quite appropriate for the Art of Unix Programming. This book is high level, built on philosophies and practices instead of the volatile low level techniques. It not only has changed the way I view programming, it has changed many of my Covey scripts. (See Seven Habits for further informaiton.)

Rating:
Summary: great "design patterns" book for sw system architecture
Review: Unix is the source of most of the design patterns that Raymond identifies (without, to his credit, using the _word_ "design patterns"...), but they're just as interesting if you're architecting a software system for windows, embedded hw, or cellphones. Any budding software architect should read and re-read this very instructive book.