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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 8, 2016
This is without a doubt the best written technical book I've ever read; it's honestly hard to believe only one person wrote and organized it. In an era where you can often get a better answer from a highly voted Stack Overflow question than you'll find most books, TLPI is 100% an exception.
The material is presented in such a fashion that pretty much anyone with a working knowledge of C can pick it up, sit down, and understand any of its topics. Kerrisk often opens with a code-light "overview" chapter on the more dense topics (e.g. networking), and his descriptions are as elegant and well-written as anything you'll find on SO or by googling. He then walks through the topic with an in-depth discussion of the various APIs and excellent example code, crucially often also mentioning now-outdated approaches you will still see pop up, so the reader isn't clueless when encountering pre-POSIX code in real life.
It's the rare book indeed which can serve as both an excellently written (and illustrated!) introduction and reference. If you're a student looking to get into linux systems programming (or been assigned some less than high quality reading), pick this up. if you're a programmer of the type who often finds himself typing "man 2 somethingsomething...", absolutely 100% pick this up. The fact that the author is also in charge of the man pages project for linux shows in his encyclopedic knowledge--what makes this book so outstanding is his ability to present that knowledge in an easily-digested form with tight, well-written examples.
Yes, it's massive. But trust me, there isn't a page wasted in here--even if you're experienced in the area, walking through each chapter and digesting Kerrisk's explanations will serve you well. And to any professors or teachers out there who are curious: yes, please use this as your textbook. As a grad student who hasn't been in CS for very long, I was extremely fortunate to be assigned this as a textbook for a systems programming class. Without this book, there's no way I couldn't have learned as much as I did in a fairly short period of time; more importantly, it made me come to appreciate and enjoy systems programming. It combines the readability/working examples of the best Stack Overflow answers, the comprehensiveness of man pages, and logical progression for new learners in one amazingly tight (if not light) package.
The material is presented in such a fashion that pretty much anyone with a working knowledge of C can pick it up, sit down, and understand any of its topics. Kerrisk often opens with a code-light "overview" chapter on the more dense topics (e.g. networking), and his descriptions are as elegant and well-written as anything you'll find on SO or by googling. He then walks through the topic with an in-depth discussion of the various APIs and excellent example code, crucially often also mentioning now-outdated approaches you will still see pop up, so the reader isn't clueless when encountering pre-POSIX code in real life.
It's the rare book indeed which can serve as both an excellently written (and illustrated!) introduction and reference. If you're a student looking to get into linux systems programming (or been assigned some less than high quality reading), pick this up. if you're a programmer of the type who often finds himself typing "man 2 somethingsomething...", absolutely 100% pick this up. The fact that the author is also in charge of the man pages project for linux shows in his encyclopedic knowledge--what makes this book so outstanding is his ability to present that knowledge in an easily-digested form with tight, well-written examples.
Yes, it's massive. But trust me, there isn't a page wasted in here--even if you're experienced in the area, walking through each chapter and digesting Kerrisk's explanations will serve you well. And to any professors or teachers out there who are curious: yes, please use this as your textbook. As a grad student who hasn't been in CS for very long, I was extremely fortunate to be assigned this as a textbook for a systems programming class. Without this book, there's no way I couldn't have learned as much as I did in a fairly short period of time; more importantly, it made me come to appreciate and enjoy systems programming. It combines the readability/working examples of the best Stack Overflow answers, the comprehensiveness of man pages, and logical progression for new learners in one amazingly tight (if not light) package.
