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Comment by chubot | Hacker News Reader

This is an excellent book and the one that made me truly "get" the philosophy of Unix (e.g. using multiple processes, data over code, OOP is not the end-all be-all of abstraction, etc.)

Apparently ESR pissed a lot of people off, but that doesn't make the book bad -- it is truly excellent, and contains material you won't find anywhere else (really). Yes I can see from his writing style why people are irritated, but it actually helps the clarity of the book, oddly.

Those recommending the Unix Programming Environment must not have read this book -- they're missing the fact it covers completely different subject matter. Neither substitutes for the other.

Compare the TOC:

http://www.pearsonhighered.com/educator/product/The-UNIX-Pro...

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/

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I'm just throwing out a quote to show why I enjoyed the book.

"""To do the Unix philosophy right, you have to be loyal to excellence. You have to believe that software design is a craft worth all the intelligence, creativity, and passion you can muster.

Otherwise you won't look past the easy, stereotyped ways of approaching design and implementation; you'll rush into coding when you should be thinking. You'll carelessly complicate when you should be relentlessly simplifying — and then you'll wonder why your code bloats and debugging is so hard."""

(from the end of Chapter 1)

This seems hard to reconcile with the commonly accepted notion that unix is an example of 'worse is better'.

'Worse is better' means that simple and quick to market but flawed is better than complex and correct but slow to market. 'Complicated and flawed' has no place in that debate.

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Imperfection has better survival characteristics than perfection. The essay below describes how Unix won and LISP Machines faded away.

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

I love unix and composing operations. But I have a hard time thinking "excellence" when it comes to command line parameters of some of these tools. "inconsistent mish-mash" is what I think more often.

It's a relatively minor gripe, but I believe legitimate none the less.

It's interesting to see you say that, because the creators of Unix seem to feel the same way. See papers arguing against the addition of the '-v' option, the size and inelegance of the X window system, and so on.

That's not really a gripe with the book, so much as with the designers of Unix who did not always do the Unix philosophy right. Yes, find(1), I'm looking at you.

It's a long read ~520 pages, but worth it. I just finished it myself, I really like the final chapter where he ties the philosophy to real world political and social challenges that I think we are all trying to solve in one way or another with technology.

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