UNIX for Programmers and Users (3rd Edition) [Paperback]

Graham Glass (Author), King Ables (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0130465534 | ISBN-13: 978-0130465535 | Publication Date: February 16, 2003 | Edition: 3

UNIX for Programmers and Users, Third Edition follows in the tradition of previous editions to provide readers with complete, up-to-date coverage of UNIX. In this new edition readers will find information on basic concepts, popular utilities, shells, networking, systems programming, internals, system administration, and much more. For anyone who is interested in learning about UNIX.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This text offers an accessible overview of UNIX inside and out, including discussion of basic concepts, popular utilities, shells, networking, windowing systems, systems programming, internals, and system administration.

UNIX For Programmers and Users will he useful to novice or experienced computer science students and professionals.

The updated third edition features the following coverage:

• Describes the major flavors of UNIX and Linux
• Includes a new chapter on the Bourne Again Shell (bash) and describes all four major UNIX shells
• Documents over 100 utilities and their common options including awk, grep, sed, Perl, vi, and emacs
• Includes a fully documented "Internet Shell" program that supports redirection and piping to other Internet shells on remote hosts

Numerous illustrations, examples, summaries, quizzes, exercises, and plentiful source code complement the narrative to provide a superior UNIX learning tool for any version of UNIX.

About the Author

Graham Glass graduated from the University of Southampton, England, with a bachelor's degree in computer science and mathematics in 1983. He emigrated to the United States and obtained his master's degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1985. He then worked as a UNIX/C systems analyst and became heavily involved with research in neural networks and parallel distributed processing. He later taught at the University of Texas at Dallas, covering a wide variety of courses, including UNIX, C, assembly language, programming languages, C++, and Smalltalk. He co-founded a corporation called ObjectSpace and currently trains and consults for such companies as DSC Corporation, Texas Instruments, Northern Telecom, J.C. Penney, and Bell Northern Research, using his OOP and parallel systems knowledge to design and build a parallel object-oriented computer system and language based on the Inmos T9000 transputer chip. In his spare time, he writes music, scuba dives, skis, and occasionally sleeps.

King Ables earned his bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 1982. He has been a UNIX user, developer, systems administrator, or consultant since 1979, working at both small start-up companies and large corporations. He has provided support and training, developed UNIX product software and systems tools, and written product documentation and training materials. In the 1990s, he was the sole proprietor of a UNIX consulting concern in Austin before deciding to move to the mountains of Colorado. Prior to this project, he published a book on UNIX systems administration. He has written many magazine articles on various UNIX topics and holds a software patent on an e-commerce privacy mechanism. His professional interests include networking security and Internet privacy, but he likes hiking and skiing a bit more.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 687 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 3 edition (February 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0130465534
• ISBN-13: 978-0130465535
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #208,384 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #76 in Books > Computers & Technology > Programming > APIs & Operating Environments

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect UNIX tutorial and reference in one, July 25, 2000

By 

Max Levin - See all my reviews

This review is from: UNIX: For Programmers and Users (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

This is an absolutely amazing book. You can read it if you know absolutely nothing about UNIX and learn how to use it. Else you can read it if you are an experienced user and find the reference information you need in a much simpler language than UNIX man pages or 1000-page manuals. The vast amount of information, no redundancy and clear explanations make this book worth every penny spent.

Contents of the book were put together were thoughtfully. It contains very comprehensive coverage of features and utilities of UNIX, including very detailed coverage of Bourne, Korn and C shells. Additionally it has very nice introductory chapters on Networking, Internet and X-Windows, just the right amount of information to give a reader solid understanding of the foundations of the topic. Programmers will surely appreciate chapters on UNIX development facilities and systems programming, which contain just the right amount of information to get you to accomplish your tasks without flooding you with unnecessary details. Also, author includes examples for every feature, short enough to effectively illustrate how to use them, which I found very helpful.

I personally used this book to teach myself UNIX (I was previously an NT person and didn't know anything about UNIX) and I am now doing hardcore development on Solaris with this book constantly on my desk.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a surprise!, July 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: UNIX: For Programmers and Users (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

I've had quite a few unix literature, but this book is one of the best I've seen on the subject. It does not intimidate beginners with unnecessary jargons, and still servers as a good reference book. I found chapter 13 (unix internals) really helpful. Don't let the dorky cover page fool you. Worth the last penny spent.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Expensive but good, March 11, 2002

By 

Venkat Raghavan Rangamani (Boxborough, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: UNIX: For Programmers and Users (2nd Edition) (Paperback)

I had to port some Windows C/C++ code to Solaris and went to the bookstore hoping to find something that would bring me up to speed with the basic utilities and UNIX concepts from the perspective of a programmer. Bookstore shelves are usually crowded with books that deal with the admin part of Unix but good programming books are a tad harder to find.

The first few chapters about the commonly used utilities quickly taught me to navigate the system but a full 4 chapters are devoted to the shell - a general introduction, bsh, ksh and csh - which was too much for me. I skipped the ksh and csh chapters. Also the systems programming chapters goes into a lot of detail about files most of which I already knew. If you, like me are a Windows programmer making a transition to Unix, be prepared to wade through and often skip stuff you already know. The good thing however is that the writing style is lucid and clear and this book is an easy read. Introduction to file permissions(chown etc) is very well written. Examples are clear and well placed. The brief introductions to perl and awk are also useful.

Though the price is on the higher side, I think this book is a good buy. Its kept me interested and reading for over a week now and I must say I know so much more Unix for that. If it had been priced say 10-12 dollars lower, I might have given this baby a 4 on 5.