Customer Reviews

The Art of UNIX Programming

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I suppose any book containing so many interesting quotes from so many UNIX luminaries cannot be overlooked. (I wonder if any of them would have co-authored this) It also happens to contain a great many topics that are well-worth writing about; My only wish is that someone less in awe with the contents of his own field of vision, and with greater depth and objectivity (not to mention humility) had the opportunity to write this book.

Quality of discussion is varied as expected; Raymond is not quite the UNIX expert he thinks he is. In places, Raymond's tone encourages one to throw the book at the nearest wall and go out just to get some fresh air; He is condescending, hectoring, lecturing, and sometimes just misleading. Alas, I will still recommend it as worth reading (check your local library) with a nice grain of salt; just enough friction for thought is provided in this edition.

When I first started reading this book, I expected to hear a considerable amount of Microsoft trashing and everything else that follows from fanatical Microsoft haters. However, what I found was an easy to follow book that illustrates many aspects of Unix programming, explains why they work, and shows examples of all of them.

The organization of the chapters is logical and the emphasis on the Unix philosophy helps with the flow of the book. Raymond starts out by enumerating the philosophy and writing a bit about each one. Many are universal, as "The Rule of Separation", "The Rule of Diversity" or "The Rule of Least Surprise" in user interfaces. However, many others are specific to Unix and its descendants such as "The Rule of Silence" and others. From there on, Raymond takes off to talk about how Unix is designed and implemented guided by the items of the Unix philosophy.

The book also includes a nice history of Unix section, which is pretty much the history of modern computing. Reading it made me all warm and fuzzy inside; it was both entertaining and informative. A must-read.

Where this book falls shortly is in some criticisms of non-Unix related topics. Object oriented programming is apparently not appreciated by Raymond. I don't agree with a lot of his claims about how object oriented programming over-complicates things. In my opinion, writing in procedural languages is messy stuff. Also, this man seems to think everything in Unix is simply perfect. Although a bit annoying at times, in many instances the result is positive becase his passion for the topic is clear.

Even though there is no code, it didn't take anything away from reading. The knowledge gained from it is HUGE because of the amount of material covered, and it WILL make you a better programmer, independent of whatever OS background you are from.

This is a really great book, 30 pages into it I had already begun raving about it to my peers. It takes the reader through years of Unix history, philosophy, application, and wisdom. It starts out slowly, explaining how an operating system can create and sustain any sort of culture. It admits the flaws in Unix and highlights it's strengths and successes. It then gets into the "Rules" of Unix Philosophy, which was something that was greatly beneficial to me in my coding life. It teaches the reader to make things modular and simple, not try to redo things that have been done before, not to be overly clever, etc.

Throughout this book the reader is given examples of some of the most basic things in the unix world, why text is so important, what "transparency" is when referring to coding, and it even includes a non-bias section reviewing some standard unix text editors. The book also gets into evaluating various languages in unix, including which is most appropriate for certain projects, which can be very helpful to someone looking to learn a programming language but who is unsure of which direction to take. A whole huge section of this book gets into the community of unix, standards, documentation, licensing, and the actual personal community.

The most thrilling part of this book for me was the History of Unix, hackers and the open srouce movement. As a history buff I always tend to be drawn to such things, and I believe he did a very good job and kept me enthralled. I also enjoyed Appendix D: Rootless Root: The Unix Koans of Master Foo, it was quite witty and amusing, as well as full of great lessons.

A wonderful computer book suitable for any sort of computer buff, even if they aren't currently working directly with Unix. It's easy to skip around this book by scanning the contents to just see what you're interested in, I really believe there is something for every computer enthusist, I am surprised a book like this hadn't been written sooner.

I was able to spend a couple of months finishing this book. As soon as I finished the first chapter, I know the book would be an excellent one, and it does not disappoint me from the beginning to the end.

I have been using Unix (and its variants) for a decade amd have quite some knowledge about "how-to", but probably like most other Unix programmers, have never systematically thought about the underlying "why". This book is going to tell you both in details.

The book contains topics in software engineering / design / implementation / interface / documentation areas. They are all supported by solid examples, both success and failure stories. This makes it stand out among numerous books on similar topics. The author's concise and clear writting style is among the best I have seen in computer books (similar to Richard Stevens's famous series, if you have to make a comparison). The author apparently does not fail on me to make me a better Unix programmer.

The book is an good complementary to your library if you are a Unix programmer (it is also refreshing even if you do not program under Unix). And I'd recommend this book to everyone who starts to program under Unix or have programmed under Unix even for a long time.

As someone who's programmed on Unix for many years, I've known about esr for some time, and probably should thank him for being part of a chorus that encouraged me to learn things like Lisp. That said, my honest opinion of this book is that it's a waste of paper and approximately the quality of a typical esr blog post.

First of all, this book is not really about Unix programming. A full half of it is dedicated to rehashing the Unix philosophy, history, and community. Yes, these topics should come up, but at some point I want to read about Unix programming, which is why I am reading a book with that phrase in the title. None of this stuff has anything to do with programming, and is just as applicable to end users.

The other half is supposedly programming related, but upon closer inspection, mostly isn't. Major topics include things like tools, config file formats, and a lot of general stuff that applies in non-Unix development too (like VCS and network protocols). Where's the system programming tips, POSIX standards, standard libraries, ioctl, BSD sockets, security considerations, and any number of hundreds of other things anyone who's programmed on a Unix-variant encounters? Yes, the book claims to not want to talk about these things, but guess what, that's what Unix programming is all about.

Languages (you know, the thing you actually program in) are completely glossed over, except to just list a few common ones. Half of the ones mentioned are so portable, that programmers in them can ignore OS peculiarities the vast majority of the time (Java, Python, Emacs Lisp). C, C++, and shell are very tightly coupled to Unix, and much could have been said here, but isn't. Instead of code, we're treated to reams of config file examples and other filler.

The various aspects of The Unix Way could have been stated in a single chapter. Someone interested in becoming a Unix programmer needs to know where to go to find documentation, what development resources he has available, and other practical things. An MS programmer reading this book would be just as clueless on how to start programming on Unix as before. Go pick up Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment if you want to learn this subject.

I purchased this book as soon as it was avalible is September 2003. Mr. Raymond gives good sound advice that this Computer Science student has taken to heart is his studies. The advice is so simple, obvious, and logical that you will find yourself wondering why you didn't think of these things in the first place.

Along with good advice this book also gives an insightful history of UN*X and some suggestions as why it is not "King" of the desktop today, as it should be.

Further into the book there numerious examples of good programming practices; featuring programs that follow the traditional UN*X philosophy of coding. This book also explains the many pitfalls that seem so prevenent programming practices. I say this as an experenced computer user not as programmer. With these observations I hope to become a quality UN*X programmer.

It has been noted in an other review that Mr. Raymond is big into the Linux community. Yes this is true. He is one of Linus Torvalds's right hand men and spokesmen. Mr. Raymond, to his credit, touches very little on the subject of Linux of his known dis-liking of M$ in this book.

This book will forever be in my library of programming books. You will never catch my copy of this book here on Amazon as a used book. (Unless of course I am starving to death or I am already dead and my family is selling off my stuff.) I would like to thank Mr. Raymond for sharing his many years of UN*X expertise. (I would actually like to meet him some day.)

Take a look at the online version available at http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ and think twice before buying this book. Unless you are a complete newcomer to Unix programming, TAOUP will be useless. The first part, "Design" covers the culture of Unix, and may be useful, but the rest of the text lacks the necessary depth. Real Unix programming books, like Stevens' one are much better.