The Art of UNIX Programming [Paperback]

Eric S. Raymond (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2003 | ISBN-10: 0131429019 | ISBN-13: 978-0131429017 | Edition: 1

The Art of UNIX Programming poses the belief that understanding the unwritten UNIX engineering tradition and mastering its design patterns will help programmers of all stripes to become better programmers. This book attempts to capture the engineering wisdom and design philosophy of the UNIX, Linux, and Open Source software development community as it has evolved over the past three decades, and as it is applied today by the most experienced programmers. Eric Raymond offers the next generation of "hackers" the unique opportunity to learn the connection between UNIX philosophy and practice through careful case studies of the very best UNIX/Linux programs.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Unix ranks among the great engineering accomplishments of the last half of the twentieth century, and its heir--Linux--seems already imposing and still on its way to achieving its full potential. Eric S. Raymond argues in The Art of UNIX Programming that the excellence of Unix derives as much from the fact that it was (and continues to be) a community effort as from the fact that a lot of smart people have worked to design and build it. Raymond, best known as the author of the open-source manifesto The Cathedral and the Bazaar, says in his preface that this is a "why-to" book, rather than a "how-to" book. It aims to show new Unix programmers why they should work under the old "hacker ethic"--embracing the principles of good software design for its own sake and of code-sharing.

That said, a great deal of valuable practical information appears in this book. Very little of it is in the form of code; most of the practical material takes the form of case studies and discussions of aspects of Unix, all aimed at determining why particular design characteristics are good. In many cases, the people who did the work in the first place make guest appearances and explain their thinking--an invaluable resource. This book is for the deep-thinking software developer in Unix (and perhaps Linux in particular). It shows how to fit into the long and noble tradition, and how to make the software work right. --David Wall

Topics covered: Why Unix (the term being defined to include Linux) is the way it is, and the people who made it that way. Commentary from Ken Thompson, Steve Johnson, Brian Kernighan, and David Korn enables readers to understand the thought processes of the creators of Unix.

From the Back Cover

"Reading this book has filled a gap in my education. I feel a sense of completion, understand that UNIX is really a style of community. Now I get it, at least I get it one level deeper than I ever did before. This book came at a perfect moment for me, a moment when I shifted from visualizing programs as things to programs as the shadows cast by communities. From this perspective, Eric makes UNIX make perfect sense."
--Kent Beck, author of Extreme Programming Explained, Test Driven Development, and Contributing to Eclipse

"A delightful, fascinating read, and the lessons in problem-solvng are essential to every programmer, on any OS."
--Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in Java and Thinking in C++

Writing better software: 30 years of UNIX development wisdom

In this book, five years in the making, the author encapsulates three decades of unwritten, hard-won software engineering wisdom. Raymond brings together for the first time the philosophy, design patterns, tools, culture, and traditions that make UNIX home to the world's best and most innovative software, and shows how these are carried forward in Linux and today's open-source movement. Using examples from leading open-source projects, he shows UNIX and Linux programmers how to apply this wisdom in building software that's more elegant, more portable, more reusable, and longer-lived.

Raymond incorporates commentary from thirteen UNIX pioneers:

• Ken Thompson, the inventor of UNIX.
• Ken Arnold, part of the group that created the 4BSD UNIX releases and co-author of The Java Programming Language.
• Steven M. Bellovin, co-creator of Usenet and co-author of Firewalls and Internet Security.
• Stuart Feldman, a member of the Bell Labs UNIX development group and the author of make and f77.
• Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, principal architects of the X windowing system.
• Steve Johnson, author of yacc and of the Portable C Compiler.
• Brian Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language, The UNIX Programming Environment, The Practice of Programming, and of the awk programming language.
• David Korn, creator of the korn shell and author of The New Korn Shell Command and Programming Language.
• Mike Lesk, a member of the Bell Labs development group and author of the ms macro package, the tbl and refer tools,lex and UUCP.
• Doug McIlroy, Director of the Bell Labs research group where UNIX was born and inventor of the UNIX pipe.
• Marshall Kirk McKusick, developer of the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and a leader of the 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD teams.
• Henry Spencer, a leader among early UNIX developers, who created getopt, the first open-source string library, and a regular-expression engine used in 4.4BSD.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 560 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (October 3, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131429019
• ISBN-13: 978-0131429017
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (38 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #274,343 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #97 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > APIs & Operating Environments

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Autohagiography with some programming tips, December 24, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Art of UNIX Programming (Paperback)

The writing style of this book tends to hurt the reading experience, as Raymond trumpets his own minor achievments in the free software community. The work feels like it needed one more rewrite before being released to the public: some related sources Raymond hadn't yet read at the time of writing, and some of his advice gets repetitive.

The exposition itself is not up to par with The Elements of Programming Style. Raymond tries to give a list of programming rules or principles to follow, but it reads more like a list of slogans that should be taken as axioms. While The Elements of Programming Style itself had a list of rules, the rules were well woven with each other, well defended, and they were used as a means of conveying a larger story. In Raymond's case, he relies upon the slogans in absence of such a story.

Thus, the book ends up more like a list of random unrelated tips. Some very profound, like his writings on threads (which he acknowleges Mark M. Miller for his help). Others are very shallow and pointless in a book that supposes to call itself about "Art." Some of the pieces appear only to function to attack Windows, and sometimes the information about Windows is embarassingly inaccurate.

One final criticism is that Raymond does not understand object-oriented programming very well and misses the point in several cases. You just need to see the popularity of Python, Java, C# (Mono), OO Perl and C++ in the Linux world to see that Raymond is off base calling OO a failed experiment. In fact, with almost any matter of opinion in the book you can feel Raymond's bias and be hit in the face with misinformation or dull false dilemmas.

However, given this book's many flaws, I rate this 3 stars instead of 2 stars because it also has valuable information from the many contributors, some of them Gods in the Unix world. These contributors often even disagree with Raymond, or point out other interesting tidbits. For these tips alone, it is worth checking out this book, though I would not recommend you buy it.

To get the true Unix programming philosophy, I recommend Software Tools, by Kernighan and Plauger. It's somewhat dated, and I recommend the Ratfor version of it, but that single book has became very influencial as I grow as a Unix programmer.

38 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Highly informative and readable, though very biased, November 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Art of UNIX Programming (Paperback)

Raymond does a good job of explaining the philosophy driving the Unix-style of programming. Coming from a background programming Windows, I always thought of the Unix approach (lots of abbreviated command-line utilities, mini-languages, pipes, semi-unstructured text-based process integration) as down-right primitive. However, after reading this book, I've started to understand the philosophy (and the practical reasons) for adopting this approach. I'd definitely recommend this book especially to newbie programmers from the Windows or Mac (pre-OS X) worlds. That said, I do have some criticisms:

One of the problems with this book is the overly partisan tone it takes - one gets the impression that absolutely nothing Microsoft has ever done is of value, but the other major desktop PC OSes (Apple, Linux) represent different forms of perfection. (At home, I run Mac OSX, RedHat Linux and Windows, and have a reasonable sense of their relative strengths and weaknesses.)

So, be warned: Art of Unix Programming paints a one sided picture. The author is a well-known figure in the open source community, one of its fiercest advocates, and one of Microsoft's most vocal critics, so it might seem to strange to wish for less anti-Microsoft spin from this source. After all, the Raymond brand certainly carries with it an obligatory expectation of Windows-bashing, doesn't it?

One of the only Windows design decision which Raymond doesn't condemn is the (now discontinued) .ini file format. Even the thorough-going support for object-orientation in Windows is given short-shrift: after explaining the many horrors of object-oriented programming (according to Raymond), Unix-programmers are praised as "tend[ing] to share an instinctive sense of these problems." This section (http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/unix_and_oo.html) is particularly illustrative of the one-sided approach that Raymond takes.

Art of Unix Programming is really an excellent and informative book which could have been substantially better with a little balanced discussion. I found myself constantly second-guessing the author: Is he arguing such-and-such a point on the merits or because he simply loves UNIX & hates Microsoft so much? While the book does a great job of articulating and illustrating the UNIX idiom, it's a shame that the reading experience is marred by mistrust. If he hadn't been so blindly anti-Microsoft, we'd be able to more confidently rely on his conclusions, and the text would be not merely highly informative (as it is), but definitive (as it is not). Four stars, therefore, instead of five.

PS: You can find this book on-line with Google - no charge.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The patterns of UNIX and how you can use them, April 17, 2004

By 

Lars Bergstrom "LarsBerg" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Art of UNIX Programming (Paperback)

Even for a primarily Windows programmer, this is a great book to read. He provides a great overview of the Unix design philosophy, its evolution over time, and the things that it still doesn't handle well (user-centered design). He also digs deeper into a lot of the patterns in program organization and coordination to help you choose what to build into a utility, what to expose as a library, and what to package as a set of binaries. There's even a small bit of programming advice from place to place. I'd highly recommend reading the book to at least get a sense of perspective when you're designing your next system. He's right on the mark that the Windows and UNIX worlds have a completely different philosophy on program construction, each with their own merits.

His comments about the Windows registry were a bit distressing, though -- not because they're negative, which I consider fine. Rather, it was obvious he'd never used it (comments like "there's no API for it") and it was also clear that he hadn't even bothered to research why it existed and what problems it was intended to solve. The comments were typical of what I'd expect of a Slashdot troll, but not of a bright, respectable person like ESR. I've programmed on both platforms extensively and only comment on what I have first-hand experience and knowledge of; I'd expect him to do the no less, especially as an author.

It was also curious that several times he implied unit testing == XP == agile software development. For as tuned in as he seems to be to methodolgy work, missing the forest for a single leaf is a bit embarrassing.