The Art of Unix Programming | Hacker News Reader

The Art of Unix Programming

faqs.org

88 pointsgeoka918 comments

I bought this book years ago, and the title is misleading. It is not so much a programming, as ESR's personal interpretation of UNIX culture and values.

If you like ESR, you will probably love it. If not, it will read like unstructured drivel.

Maybe, I am too negative. But if you are a non-UNIX programmer, and have to work on a UNIX project, there are far better books available. (E.g. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen Rago)

To be fair, the subject of the title is "Art" and the object is "Programming". This is about the art and care that developers should put into the Unix community and the tools they build. In a way, it's an intro to the mindset and philosophy of openness in technology.

> Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen Rago

Stevens was a great writer, but his books covered precisely all that was and is wrong with 'modern' Unix systems, they could be considered a summary of what is the opposite to the Unix philosophy.

To truly understand the Unix way, Pike and Kernighan's The Unix Programming Environment is by far the best choice.

Does anyone else find ESR's writings to be haughty and a bit sophomoric? He may be brilliant, but every time I pick up this book I get turned off almost immediately.

I find his stuff to be infectiously enthusiastic and inspiring.

I find ESR's style quite irritating, though this book has enough good content that I would still recommend it.

His points about Unix usually stand on their own, and the polemic about Windows distract from them.

Besides using wget to rip the entire thing is there a tar.gz or zip handy with everything in it? Flying soon and would like some offline reading material...

I was looking for that too, but didn't see it.

What's better for dl'ing an entire website and maintaining its structure, wget or httrack?

I was just thinking this too: it looks like an ideal Kindle read.

http://www.amazon.com/Art-UNIX-Programming-ebook/dp/B003U2T5...

> This book and its on-line version are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0

So I think it is OK to post this PDF version.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.103...

Thanks very much....I really need to get a tablet just for these types of books...

Just make sure that you don't get one that is too small - I borrowed an iRex iLiad [1] from the library at the university, and I found that the 8.1-inch (21 cm) display meant constant "scrolling" with the touch-pen, which was rather annoying due to the high response-time of the system.

The only book that I finished reading on it, was Mercurial: The Definitive Guide by Bryan O'Sullivan [2]. The reason that I could read this book, was that it was released for free online by the author with all source files so that I could compile it in a smaller page-format with bigger fonts (the figures did not scale automatically, but IMHO, they weren't crucial to understanding the content of the book).

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILiad

[2]: http://hgbook.red-bean.com/

Well I personally bought the dead tree version, and use the website for reference sometimes.

I found this book at my university's library, and ended up spending most of the day reading it there. I liked it, and didn't know it was online, too.

The entire faq is very very long. Here's a tl;dr high level list of rules and philosophies: http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch01s06.html

It's not a FAQ but a book!

This contains some good bits, but "The Unix Programming Environment" by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan is a much more eloquent and concise explanation of the essence of the Unix philosophy.

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