The Art of UNIX Programming at Dominant Systems Book Store

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.

Customer Reviews & Comments
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). Others are very shallow and pointless in a book that supposes to call itself about "Art." Some of the pieces appear only to function to attack Windows, and sometimes the information about Windows is embarassingly inaccurate. One final criticism is that Raymond does not understand object-oriented programming very well and misses the point in several cases. You just need to see the popularity of Python, Java, C# (Mono), OO Perl and C++ in the Linux world to see that Raymond is off base calling OO a failed experiment. In fact, with almost any matter of opinion in the book you can feel Raymond's bias and be hit in the face with misinformation or dull false dilemmas. However, given this book's many flaws, I rate this 3 stars instead of 2 stars because it also has valuable information from the many contributors, some of them Gods in the Unix world. These contributors often even disagree with Raymond, or point out other interesting tidbits. For these tips alone, it is worth checking out this book, though I would not recommend you buy it. To get the true Unix programming philosophy, I recommend Software Tools, by Kernighan and Plauger. It's somewhat dated, and I recommend the Ratfor version of it, but that single book has became very influencial as I grow as a Unix programmer.

Back To Top