Customer Reviews

Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment (2nd Edition)

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This badly needed update to the classic first edition preserves what is best about the old edition, which is the format and attention to detail, and adds the changes that have occurred to the UNIX operating system since the first edition was published back in 1992. Specifically, there are implementation samples for FreeBSD, Linus, and MAC OS X included. This edition is as the first one was, an excellent reference for anyone doing system level programming in C or C++ on the UNIX platform. It is was never intended to teach the reader the fundamentals of the UNIX environment nor to teach C/C++ programming. The author assumes a strong knowledge of both. The book begins much as the first edition did, by explaining the UNIX kernel in generic terms. It then goes on to explain the various implementations of UNIX and their specific differences. You will find chapters three through ten largely unchanged from the first edition, as the basic mechanisms of file I/O, directory structure, interprocess control, and signaling have not evolved since that time. Chapters eleven and twelve are two new added chapters on threads, as threading has become very important in UNIX system programming. Also, gone is the chapter on interfacing to a postscript printer. It is replaced by a more modern chapter on communicating with a network printer. The HTTP protocol is discussed in this context. The book contains a rich set of examples and downloadable code that is very useful. In addition, the book contains the implementations of two large-scale projects: a database library and communication with a network printer. Each project includes complete code with schematics. This book also contains numerous exercises, and the solutions to some of those exercises are included in the back of the book. Since Amazon, and some reviewers, show the table of contents for the first edition but not the second, I include that here for the purpose of completeness:
1. UNIX System Overview
2. UNIX Standardization and Implementations
3. File I/O
4. Files and Directories
5. Standard I/O Library
6. System Data Files and Information
7. Process Environment
8. Process Control
9. Process Relationships
10. Signals
11. Threads
12. Thread Control
13. Daemon Processes
14. Advanced I/O
15. Interprocess Communication
16. Network IPC: Sockets
17 Advanced IPC
18. Terminal I/O
19. Pseudo Terminals
20. A Database Library
21. Communicating with a Network Printer
Appendix A. Function Prototypes
Appendix B. Miscellaneous Source Code
Appendix C. Solutions to Selected Exercises

Many of you who learnt unix in the 90s would have cut your teeth on the first edition of this book. This second edition should be well received. It encapsulates the changes in the unix world since 92. Most importantly, it shows the rise of linux. A rise that is still unabated.

Broadly, the structure of this edition matches the first edition. Rago was brought in as co-author after Stevens died in 99, and he has deliberately kept this consistency. I was glad to see that Rago kept the exercises at the end of each chapter. Many computer books seem to dispense with this, which can be a pity for anyone who needs hands on tasks to learn from.

The threading chapters are a significant change from the first edition. Not simple reading, but they do reflect powerful ways to possibly optimise your code. The biggest cost for you may be the effort you need to invest in understanding the coding issues in these chapters. Rago's code examples are deliberately short, and necessarily somewhat artificial. But they do demonstrate well the various threading issues.

Of course, other chapters have had minimal alterations. How much have terminal I/O or pseudoterminals changed in 10 years? Those chapters may be old friends to you.

It's a must-have book for me. Having a previous edition already available, I've bought the second one - quite a bit of new Unix releases appeared since I've got the first edition, so, time to get up-to-date, especially taking into account Linux and Mac OS details available in a second edition.

The book evolved from its first edition and its definitely a mammoth task trying to keep in this edition what is relevant and what isn't but i think the authors did it :)

If you want to be a UNIX Guru, then this is definitely the book for you :)

This book is literally saving me right now in an Introduction to Operating Systems class I'm taking. We have projects to complete in the UNIX envrionment and the fact that this book gives you every real code example you could possibly need for all levels of systems programming is GOLD. It's laid out in a very straightforward way, has tons of code examples, and is overall awesome. Highly recommend if you're just getting into systems programming on your own, or as a school reference book.

This book is a classic and remains a very valuable conceptual guide. While the text seems to be up-to-date, the accompanying code suffers from the age of the environment in which is was originally written and has not been ported to Linux. I write this review from the Linux point of view as I am not programming in the Sun or BSD environment.

I purchased the book with the idea of learning pty programming for Fedora. While the chapter was very informative in its discussions, using the man pages is required. As the source code accompanying the book doesn't address Linux, per se, and one may be tempted to use the apue.linux3.tar.Z download with its Red Hat port of the common library. Downloading it may be helpful, but the added code was written for Red Hat 6 and the book is newer than that. Specifically, the pty open code was not functional and I reverted to the svr4 code which still needed tweaking.

Some of the original sample code is architecturally out of step with the current way of doing things. For example, originally ptys were found by canonically generating all pty names until one could be successfully opened. The sample code is written to return the successfully generated name. The current method in Linux (and elsewhere, I suppose) is to open("/dev/ptmx") and then call ptsname(). So plan on using this to study and then writing your own more modern code or tweak the sample code as needed. Of course, one of the goals of the code is to create a portable library to support various *nix flavors, so this criticism may be overstated.

Still, it seems a thorough modernization of the sample code would have made this book more valuable. But as I said, I am not programming in the Sun or BSD environment.

I occasionally need to fix broken IPC code and figure out behavior differences
of legacy code between Solaris, Linux, etc., code written years ago by somebody
else in C.

This book, (and Stevens' earlier books before this) has been immensely useful.
The code samples alone are worth their weight in gold :-). Seriously, this book
has saved me many days of hard work, several times over.

A quick browse of the book is usually enough to find the details (what I would
call 'arcane details', but I guess this is because I'm not an expert C/networking
programmer), figure out the problem AND how to fix the problem.

This book has been a 'project-saver'. I cannot recommend this text too highly.

Is it just me or did this book quintuple in size between the first and second versions. This book is now an almost thousand page hardback tome. But all that extra bulk is not a bad thing in this case. Each sub-system is now covered in amazing detail. The illustrations are fantastic. And the book covers the bevy of Unix variants which makes it extremely valuable. Definitely a must have second edition for any programmer whose primary platform is Unix.

Its a very extensive book that covers concepts and advanced features of UNIX. It covers UNIX implementation of different features as a user point of view and how to access diffent services of UNIX like OSs. If you want to learn UNIX /Linux based programming this book a must read & must have for reference. I highly recommend this book

This text book is easy for anyone who study about computer directly and has some experience with Linux. It give you both of knowlege and C source code example.if you want to know about Unix and others unix-based operating system, I recommend it.