[Sussex] The Art of Unix Programming

[Geoff Teale]

Ahhh,  I've literally just finished reading Eric S. Raymond's latest
book "The Art of Unix Programming".  You can read this on-line at:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/

.. but I would encourage you to buy the book if the subject matter
interests you.

Unsurprisingly this book finds a way to carp on about how great
Fetchmail is. ;)

Other than that I think it is something that a lot of people coming into
Unix/Linux at this juncture could really benefit from reading.  You're
not going to learn how to code C, bash, Java or any other language from
this book, that is not the point.  What this book is about is
communicating what the core concepts of Unix development are, what the
advantages and how you can apply them.  Key to this is contrast with
other OS's mechanisms.  

Why is this important?  Well I have a bee in my bonnet about developers
who are new to Unix - specifically the hoards now coming in from the
Windows and MacOS worlds.  On various development mailing lists I've
seen a lot of posts like:

"Does linux have a registry?  How the hell do I store my settings?"
"Linux sux, it doesn't have ActiveX/COM/DCOM so I can't script
OpenOffice.org like MS Office."
"Linux doesn't have anything like Applescript so I can't script my
applications"

... this bothers me.  Unix (and thus Linux) has far better mechanisms
for persistent meta-data, IPC and scripting than Windows or the old
MacOS series ever developed - why are people having so much trouble
doing things?

I think the key is that people are coming to the platform looking for a
free clone of Windows rather than embracing what makes it a _better_
platform.  Worse still, a lot of development effort is being expended on
building Window's style, GUI only tools with fragile and inconsistent
IPC, clunky API based scripting and very rigid use parameters. 

ESR's book could help a lot of developers out by showing them just how
good the underlying principles of Unix are and how you can build much
better applications with Unix than with Windows or MacOS.  In the course
of this he discusses the underlying concepts of various OS's and the
style of development they encourage and discusses what is good and bad
about each.  I particularly encourage you to read this analysis of the
Windows NT family of OS's:

http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch03s02.html#nt_contrast


-- 
Geoff Teale 
tealeg at member.fsf.org 
Free Software Foundation. 

"It's ten o'clock... Do you know where your AI programs are?"  
-- Peter Oakley