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. In addition, commentary is provided by Brian Kernighan, UNIX pioneer and best-selling author; Doug McIlroy, the inventor of the UNIX pipg; David Korn, the inventor of the korn shell; Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, inventors of X windows; Henry Spencer, an original UNIX hacker; and Ken Arnold, an original BSD developer and JINI creator; Mike Lesk, author of the legendary uucp, lex, and tbl programs; and Sturat Feldman, author of UNIX's famous make utility.
The book is divided into 4 parts. Part I explores the philosophy behind the development of UNIX. Part II explores design principles and patterns that are at the core of the UNIX tradition. Part III covers the rich UNIX tradition of reuse and the amazing variety of programming tools available to the UNIX developer. Part IV explores the UNIX open standards process, and the advantage in portability that UNIX enjoys.
By:
Eric Raymond
Imprint: Addison Wesley
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 28mm,
Width: 232mm,
Spine: 178mm
Weight: 780g
ISBN: 9780131429017
ISBN 10: 0131429019
Series: Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series
Publication Date: 23 September 2003
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
I. CONTEXT. 1. Philosophy. Culture? What culture? The durability of Unix. The case against learning Unix culture. What Unix gets wrong. What Unix gets right. Basics of the Unix philosophy. The Unix philosophy in one lesson. Applying the Unix philosophy. Attitude matters too. 2. History. Origins and history of Unix, 1969-1995. Origins and history of the hackers, 1961-1995. The open-source movement: 1998 and onward. The lessons of Unix history. 3. Contrasts. The elements of operating-system style. Operating-system comparisons. What goes around, comes around. II. DESIGN. 4. Modularity. Encapsulation and optimal module size. Compactness and orthogonality. Libraries. Unix and object-oriented languages. Coding for modularity. 5. Textuality. The Importance of Being Textual. Data file metaformats. Application protocol design. Application protocol metaformats. 6. Transparency. Some case studies. Designing for transparency and discoverability. Designing for maintainability. 7. Multiprogramming. Separating complexity control from performance tuning. Taxonomy of Unix IPC methods. Problems and methods to avoid. Process partitioning at the design level. 8. Minilanguages. Taxonomy of languages. Applying minilanguages. Designing minilanguages. 9. Transformation. Data-driven programming. Ad-hoc code generation. 10. Configuration. What should be configurable? Where configurations live.
