Customer Reviews

4.4bsd User's Supplementary Documents (Usd)

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I bought this book at a computer book sale for about $$$ a long time ago, but I am unsure about whether I would recommend anyone to buy it at full price, unless you are very interested in reading mostly obsolete documentation for mostly obsolete programs in the mostly obsolete 4.4BSD distribution.

Most (all?) of the documentation in this book should be available either on the web (somewhere), or in the original sources, but today, even those can probably be hard to track.

Of possible use can be the tutorial and advanced tutorial to ed, and the tutorials on vi and nvi/nex (all obsolete, but still good), the 10 chapters on troff/nroff and related macros and programs (which today are mostly kept around just to format manpages, and keep bearded unix-oldtimers silent), the introductory chapters on sh and csh (obsolete, but given the age, probably very portable if you limit yourself to this style), and the two short chapters on sed and awk. Especially the ed and nroff stuff is hard to find elsewhere in a readable form.

The main reason to own this book is the geek factor. Most of the chapters are written by eminent figures, such as Brian Kernighan and Bill Joy, ages ago, and it is somewhat fun to have it in a bound volume. The other reason is because you actually are genuinly interested in learning about ed, troff, or mh.