The Art of UNIX Programming

Author: Eric S. Raymond List Price: $39.99 Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price ISBN: 0131429019 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (17 September, 2003) Edition: Paperback Sales Rank: 7,076 Average Customer Rating: 4.53 out of 5

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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.

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.

Several reviewers critique author Eric Raymond's assessments of programming languages and the Windows OS family. As a security engineer I see Windows continue to fail miserably, so much so that I'm beginning to agree that Windows cannot be secured. (Almost one year ago I criticized Bellovin et al for the same judgment, but now I tend to agree.) I would be surprised if a real Windows advocate reviewed and contributed to drafts of TAOUP, as a few strategic pro-Windows points might have made ESR's other arguments stronger. A second way to strengthen the anti-Windows stance would be more technical discussion of Windows flaws. The devastating "shatter" flaws of 2002 merit no more than a footnote on page 69, but could have a been a whole section unto themselves.

Regarding languages and OS comparisons, at this early point in my career I fit the "fool" category of p. 507. I leave it to more experienced developers to debate programming language virtues. It seems the author is not as current on language developments as his critics, which is regrettable but understandable given TAOUP's scope. I personally questioned the repeated invocation of Emacs Lisp. I found ESR's recommendation to employ interpreted languages useful and plan to take a closer look at Python. I question ESR's claim on p. 382 that GCC is so powerful that "there is effectively no proprietary UNIX compiler market left," when Sun's compiler for Solaris seems to outperform GCC.

I found histories of "UNIX vs. UNIX" and "UNIX vs the world" very informative. TAOUP presents concise explanations of licensing, RFC creation, and UNIX philosophy. I was happy to see that an open source project to which I contribute (Sguil) met many UNIX design criteria, like text-based communication between small collaborating daemons. I plan to follow TAOUP's recommendations for documentation so helpfully discussed in chapter 18 when I release the next set of Sguil guides.

TAOUP offers numerous priceless quotes from UNIX pioneers, but ESR himself offers my favorite: "Open source is what happens when code reuse gets a flag and an army." I hope UNIX advocates everywhere carry TAOUP into battle against their proprietary, monopolistic OS foes. With a few more nods to the enemy and a more balanced comparison of languages, TAOUP will be unbeatable.

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