Solaris Systems Programming (paperback) 1st Edition

The only reason this book is a good Unix systems book is because it is a nearly section by section rip of Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment by Stevens. If you have a choice between Teer's book or Stevens book you must take Stevens' book. Stevens' 2nd edition is much more comprehensive and contains important content that Teer's book lacks, such as threads.

This book may be easily read page after page. Teer has a very subtle wit and actually places numerical jokes in his code examples. It is very much like older UNIX texts in that it covers off well documented material but does the great justice of bringing it all under one roof. He presents the information with complete code examples not merely fragments or pseudo code. Teer illustrates the concepts and walks the reader carefully through the learning process. One may easily replace six other UNIX text books from the past and gain updated knowledge while losing nothing.

I have had this text on my desktop for nearly a year. Over a year in fact and I use it often. It is precious for anyone that must look closely at UNIX. One may place the Kernighan & Pike "The Practice of Programming" along with "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan & Ritchie on that same desktop and rest assured you are well covered.

It should be noted that I had the opportunity to preview and edit the text before publication and I have withheld my public comments until now. I wanted the opportunity for the OpenSolaris project to be born and for this text to establish itself without the possibility of prejudiced opinion.

This is an essential text. It is fit for any university computer science student or professional software engineer.

Dennis Clarke
[...]

System programming with reference to a specific operating system involves the proper usage of C program function calls that the operating system has available so that programmers can hook into the internals of the operating system itself and influence and utilize such things as the file system, the date and time functions, and process control. 13 years ago when I first began UNIX system programming on Sun computers, they came with reference books that had this material. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.

Richard Stevens' book "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment" has been a great book on generic UNIX systems programming since it was first published. However, there are so many facets of system programming that are unique to Solaris that this is an essential book. The book is logically laid out and discusses all of the hooks available to you via Solaris system programming function calls. There are plenty of code examples, detailed explanations of function parameters, and even some exercises with some solutions available. In conjunction with "Solaris Internals", just recently released in its second edition, there is a wealth of information available on how the system programmer can monitor Solaris, or perhaps add some features of their own.

The first two chapters are an introduction to operating system components in general and the history of Solaris through Solaris 9- the current version being Solaris 10. The book is then divided into system programming topics. The first of these is "fundamental topics", which basically starts with manipulating strings using the C programming language and then goes through the basic resources available to the Solaris system programmer. Next, each topic that was covered in the introductory fundamental topics section now gets its own section in the book - input/output, process control, interprocess communication, and pseudo-terminals.

I highly recommend this book to any C programmer that needs to write programs to interface to the Solaris operating system. I notice the table of contents is not shown, so I present that next:
Part 1 INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1 Introduction 3
Chapter 2 A Brief History of Solaris 45

Part 2 FUNDAMENTAL TOPICS 57
Chapter 3 Utility Functions 59
Chapter 4 Basic File I/O 123
Chapter 5 The Standard I/O Library 159
Chapter 6 Date and Time Operations 201
Chapter 7 Users and Groups 223
Chapter 8 System Information and Resource Limits 275
Chapter 9 Secure C Programming 337

Part 3 INPUT/OUTPUT 351
Chapter 10 Files and Directories 353
Chapter 11 Working with File Systems 417
Chapter 12 Terminal I/O 461
Chapter 13 Advanced I/O 507

Part 4 PROCESSES AND PROCESS CONTROL 601
Chapter 14 The Environment of a UNIX Process 603
Chapter 15 Process Control 629
Chapter 16 Process Relationships 677
Chapter 17 Signals 703
Chapter 18 Daemon Processes 805

Part 5 INTERPROCESS COMMUNICATION 827
Chapter 19 Interprocess Communication Using Pipes and FIFOs 829
Chapter 20 The System V Interprocess Communication Facility 867
Chapter 21 Advanced Interprocess Communication 927
Chapter 22 Doors 951

Part 6 PSEUDO TERMINALS 995
Chapter 23 Pseudo Terminals 997

Appendix A An Internationalization and Localization Primer 1035
Appendix B The BSD Source Compatibility Package 1047
Appendix C Function Summary 1057
Appendix D Miscellaneous Source Code 1117
Appendix E Solutions to Selected Exercises

This book has been very helpful to me and will enhance my understanding of Unix and more specifically, Solaris.

Before this book, I held the book, "Unix Internals: A Systems Operations Handbook" by Shaw and Shaw as the bible of figuring out the innards of Unix. Rich Teer's new book, "Solaris Systems Programming," has taken that title and will now be my favorite Unix internals book.

The book is well-written, thorough and has many examples. I wish Teer would have put in more details on threads programming, but I guess you can only go so far.

I have recommended this book to almost all of my colleagues and will recommend it to anybody with any kind of programming background as a good reference for not only learning Unix systems programming, but learning Unix and how it works from a more detailed stand-point than the "Intro" books.