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The Art of Unix Programming (2003) (arp242.net)
111 points by vermaden on Jan 18, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments



What is special about the linked website with an opinionated reformat of this classical book? Imho a link to author 's site would be more appropriate.


What I see posted here is light-years more readable and more pleasing than what I see at the author's site[0].

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



I noticed these criticisms of the Unix philosophy.

Postel's law of accepting liberally and emitting conservatively is getting blamed for leading to bloated programs that need to parse bad input. https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-thomson-postel-was-wrong-0...

Text formats like JSON and XML are easy to write by hand now with better editors and Python scripts for parsing them are easy to write. Idiosyncratic file formats may not be escaped correctly. An regex scan for "Inactive" can give false positives and negatives. A program that checks JSON will fail rather than giving a false answer.

"The internet is running in debug mode" : http://java-is-the-new-c.blogspot.com/2014/10/why-protocols-...

File formats can give way to programs using Sqlite. https://www.sqlite.org/whentouse.html


The title reminded me of The Art of Prolog. Also pretty awesome book.


I am in the middle of this right now and enjoying it immensely.




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