[Sussex] The Art of Unix Programming

[Geoff Teale]

I'll just clarify some things here.

With reference to Nik's comment - in terms of Unix developers.  Whilst
Unix might not have the installed user base that Windows can claim I'd
be interested to see what the established user base for any given
software development environment is, I imagine that the percentage of
Unix users who are also developers would be many orders of magnitude
larger than in the equivalent portion of the  Windows user base. 
Interestingly I have definitely seen several reports from various
independent agencies in the last year that have reported that there are
currently more _commercial_ developers working on Unix and Linux
software than there are working on Windows projects (although the
margins were as a I recall pretty close).


That aside, there is also the point that ESR makes - Windows API and
concepts are not stable, transparent, wholly logical or (in a lot of
cases) engineered to be useful.  The core APIs of the Windows NT based
operating systems are frankly the result of knocking up whatever will
tick the right boxes so that the customer can see a check list that
includes the things they want (there's your marketeers input).

>From an API point of view I do believe that the basic Unix API's have
been cast in stone since POSIX came about in the late 1980's and prior
to that the major differences were only really in the networking arena. 
More importantly the fundemental concepts that Unix was built around
haven't changed since 1980 and the wealth of development experience
built on top of them is far greater than any given Microsoft API.  

After all that.. I'd just like to say, that my original point was this:

Reading ESR's book would be a good thing for new developers on
Linux/Unix platforms.  If you write software in the same way you right
it on Windows then at best it's not going to utilise the OS to the
maximum and at worst it'll be worse than a Windows equivalent because
the OS isn't set up with the same ideas in mind.

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

To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a
test load.