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Linux Application Development
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Author: Michael K. Johnson, Erik W. Troan
List Price: $47.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201308215
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (20 April, 1998)
Edition: Hardcover
Sales Rank: 94,762
Average Customer Rating: 4.39 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Contains information that is hard to find in other places.
This book contains information that is just not in more introductory level Linux programming books. It is really Linux specific, rather than a Unix programming book that just has Linux printed on its cover because Linux sells books right now. In addition to covering the traditional interfaces, the Linux specific interfaces that those are built on top of are also covered.
Readers should notice that several of the interfaces used in this book are being depreciated infaver of reintrant (thread/signal safe) versions. This is something that hadn't yet happened when this book was written and is easily fixed by reading the man pages for any function that you worry about, as most have been made thread safe or have a thread safe version now.
Before reading this, I spent a lot of time using strace (easier than reading source code for apps and libs) on programs to figure out how they did things that other books on Unix or Linux programming left out.
The GOOD parts of this book are mostly in section 3 (system programming) and later, but well worth getting the book just for that.
To read this book you should:
_ know how to program in C
_ know how to use Unix or Linux from a command shell
_ know what users and groups are
Like most Linux books, this one waste too much space in the beginning telling what Linux is, what Unix is, and other stuff that is just included in too many books already.
This book may not tell you everything there is to know about programming for Linux, but it tells you enough to let man pages tell you the rest.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Fantastic book
Johnson and Troan is a great book for Linux programmers. It covers in good detail a wide range of topics in system programming, including process management, file and directory structures, linux development tools, signals, and terminal programming. Network programming is lightly covered, but network programming is a very large topic and is covered well in other books. Threads are also not covered, but again, threaded programming is a complex topic and is covered elsewhere. Johnson and Troan contains a long running example program, ladsh, which is a shell. This is a great example because developing a shell requires a high degree of interaction with the kernel and file system. The book does a great job of accurately covering the function prototypes for the core system library, including the many flags passed as parameters. Overall this is an excellent book, and it is one of the most frequently used programming texts on by shelf. I highly recommend it.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Difficult to Read Program Listings
I haven't read this yet, so take my "3 stars" with a grain of salt. What immediately struck me was the lousy font chosen for the program listings. It is very weak and while the listings are readable, and most programmers know where to expect {} vice (), for example, it would be nice if your eyes could immediately differentiate between such similar characters. Mine can't.
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