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POSIX Programmer's Guide
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Author: Donald Lewine
List Price: $39.95
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0937175730
Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates (01 April, 1991)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 78,578
Average Customer Rating: 5 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 5 out of 5
Oops
Of course I meant POSIX 1003.1 in the previous review. Donald Lewine explains the whole numbering system and the relationship of POSIX to other standards on pp. 2-5 of this book.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Best Way to Write Portable Programs
For many programmers, interoperability is the name of the game.
Write once, compile everywhere. Yes, compile, because a compiled
program runs 80 times as fast as an interpreted program. Now comes
the gotcha: different compilers come with different libraries.
C source written for HP-UX might look different from C source written
for Solaris, which might look different from C source written for AIX
or Linux. What features of the language should we use? What library
calls should we use? Answer: Use ANSI C with IEEE 1002.3 POSIX
standard library calls. This gives you the most bang for your buck,
because nearly all C compilers support these standards. Write your
code on one platform, compile it on the other platforms. If you
conform to the POSIX standard, you will minimize your porting
headaches. Follow this book and you'll conform to the standard.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Guide for the Newbie, Reference for the Pro
After 10 years of developing real-time software for DOS and embedded systems, I needed to develop software for the real-time O/S, QNX, a POSIX compliant O/S. Unlike DOS, QNX is a real operating system which demands a different programming paradigm. Without Lewine's book, I'm not certain I could have made the shift.This book may be too complicated for somebody unfamiliar with C programming. But, if you know the language, it provides all the basics to successfully create software on a POSIX system. The first half of the book elaborates on how to do things in POSIX. Lewine does not assume that the reader knows anything about UNIX. Plenty of example code clarifies the the theory. All the examples are heavily annotated. One cannot *not* learn the POSIX programming paradigm from this book. For real-time programming, information about POSIX.4 was needed, and I gleaned this from Gallmeister's PROGRAMMING FOR THE REAL WORLD POSIX.4, also an O'Reilly book. Once through these books, code began to flow from my keyboard. The QNX library manuals made far more sense. As an "expert" (I've been doing this for about 5 years), I still refer to the back of Lewine's book. The last half is a reference to the POSIX library functions. Although I haven't done much programming under LINUX, I presume this would be a useful reference for that O/S. The latter half of the book documents the function calls at least as well as any manual for a C programming library that I've ever seen. I've gotten to the point where this book mostly sits on my shelf--but it's comforting to know that when I can't remember the arguments for sigprocmask(), I can take it down and find the answer quickly.
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