Customer Reviews

Interprocess Communications in UNIX: The Nooks and Crannies (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm the sort who prefers a well done quick reference guide to a textbook. If the material is presented clearly enough, I don't need or want to wade through page after page laying the groundwork for things I either already know or can figure out for myself. This book seems written with me in mind. It covered almost every aspect of Unix interprocess communications in sufficient detail for me to begin writing useful code. In addition to the nuts and bolts, the commentary provides useful tips and caveats, while noting which flavors of Unix/Linux support which functions, as well as which are supported in Posix.1 and Posix.4.

I think this viewpoint is reflected in the other reviews of this book - people either seem to really like it or really hate it. As someone who's made his career in embedded systems for some 20+ years, it was a great guide to fill in the blanks in my education, giving me the fundamentals and pointing me to the appropriate header files to learn the details.

In summary, if you generally know what you're doing, but need to quickly get up to speed on the things you may not already know, this is an excellent book. If you're a beginner, you may be more confused than enlightened.

This is a well written book that thoroughly covers the subject of IPC in UNIX. Gray carefully explains each topic. The chapter on sockets has sufficient information and examples to get the reader through a graduate level client/server course or familiarize the professional with these topics. I used the material on a LINUX platform with no problem.

This is one of the best introductory books on ... network programming with sockets. Believe it, although it includes just one chapter about sockets it makes a precise description of the basics of network programming, also notice that the code is ok for Linux.

I've been looking for a book that explains and provides useful examples relating to unix processes, and threads. I wanted to learn how to implement parallel programming. This need is fullfilled in this book.

This book is also easy to understand. I thank the author for his endeavor in this area.

No worthless examples.
Each source example provides information to compile and link into an executable program.

This book will not end up as a door-stop or sit beneath your monitor.

Despite the title of the text, this book provides little more than a skin-deep look at inter-process communications. The presentation is not clear, and there are significant errors in both the descriptions and example code which may actually mislead rather than assist the inexperienced. Having had to teach junior programmers the essentials of good client/server development several times, I was hoping to find a book that would cover most of the important issues; this is certainly not the one..

If you thrive on complexity, and love to read between the lines when learning a subject than this is the book for you. I had to use this book for my graduate systems programming class, and really had to struggle to understand Gray's complex method's of teaching. The book's examples are overly complex. Instead of just showing how a function works in a clear manner, the programs are full of lots of extra stuff that you must spend time figuring out before you can understand what you are trying to learn.

This book could have used a lot more diagrams to explain subjects. Furthermore, the exercises in this book were often very difficult and required my classmates and I to use outside resources to answer. This is not the way is should be. One would hope the text would give you all you need to figure out the questions. Gray apparently thrives on complexity, and the reading is rough going for people new to the subject.

I would suggest that Gray pick up a book by Peter van der Linden to see how a good technical book can be written.