
The Art of Unix Programming (2008) - fizwhiz
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/
======
kator
Someone please add [2008] to the title. I was excited when I saw this and
thought maybe Eric was updating it.

In general of course this is a great book to read, I have a hard copy (gasp)
on my shelf and when it came out I had been working on Unix systems for 20
years. There are lots of good nuggets in there. It is a good read for people
who would like to better understand the philosophy of Unix. That said if I
recall correctly it was a bit cult like in nature and like most things should
be taken with a grain of salt. Remember the historical context of when the
book was written, it was very much a war like time when many Unix heads where
certain we could "win" the OS wars. Much like the "Drug Wars" now I think a
bit of reality has set in and we realize things are not always that black and
white.

It would be awesome to see a body of work like this updated with today’s
evolution of the Unix philosophy. When I look back I think I’m so lucky to be
in technology today, what used to take me months and years I can do today in
days and weeks. We have so much foundation now, technology is more about
Legos™ versus bags of Concrete. When I started in technology almost everything
had to be built from scratch, often starting with little more then a simple
computer language, some cpu, ram and maybe a disk if you where lucky. That
made things so incredibly hard when you wanted to do anything of real value.
Today it would be impossible to design the chips we use without the chips we
built last generation and the software that leverages that power to help the
people design the next generation of chips. We live in a world that builds on
top of many generations of technology and the amplification effect is amazing
to see first hand.

Great book, read it, enjoy it and then read Eric’s other book (of many): The
Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental
Revolutionary

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danso
I'll confess that I have only recently just heard about this book and I
recently bought it after reading it for free online because of how much I
liked it. Honestly, I wish this had been a required textbook in my com sci
classes.

I've only recently started to force myself to stay in the bash
prompt...whenever I saw my coworkers type out scripts in this mode, I had
roughly the same reaction as I did when seeing my mom's printouts of COBOL
code: look at those old people with their old tricks.

The Art of Unix Programming, and the too few books similar to it, have been
profoundly helpful in helping me understand that UNIX is a steadfast _way_ of
doing things...and even if much of the code and utilities are decades old,
concepts like "Programs should do one thing well" and "Separate policy from
mechanism; separate interfaces from engines" are in, retrospect, part of
contemporary object-oriented thought...but there's something significantly
more _tangible_ to how they're implemented in UNIX.

Of course, it's more than just a happy coincidence that UNIX tools are decades
old and are yet still some of the best tools for the job...you can't ignore
that the "UNIX Way" has something to do with that longevity. But given the
_practical_ usefulness of UNIX tools, combined with their educational
value...I wish UNIX shell work was a core component of my college classes.
Unfortunately, we immediately started working in Visual C++ and Eclipse...both
of which are nice...but if you never use them again as a professional, the
work of learning to navigate them was wasted...whereas the few things I
learned in UNIX will seem to be around for a very long time.

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dominotw
" Senior engineers develop huge bodies of implicit knowledge, which they pass
to their juniors by (as Zen Buddhists put it) “a special transmission, outside
the scriptures”."

Really? I think its silly to make pretentious quotes from Zen Buddhists(
apparently). The whole book is filled with pretentious quotes from usenet
groups.

~~~
mattgreenrocks
Are you discounting the manner, or the substance here?

It's one thing to nitpick about style, but there's nothing wrong with the
assertion.

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brandur
The Internet Archive has some alternate formats available like PDF and ePub:

[https://archive.org/details/ost-computer-science-
the_art_of_...](https://archive.org/details/ost-computer-science-
the_art_of_unix_programming-1)

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Iamnotesr
Why are people saying [2008] when the copyright says 2003, and the last
revision was in September 2003?

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bogolisk
If you think that fetchmail is the best program ever written and DK's
knowledge and intellect is at the same level as ESR then you deserve this
book.

~~~
dewarrn1
OK, so you don't think much of ESR. Any alternative recommendations in the
same topic area?

~~~
abecedarius
Kernighan and Pike, The UNIX Programming Environment.

(I consider ESR's book worthwhile too, and it's less outdated. But K&P is the
purest expression I've seen of how to Unix.)

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davidgerard
This is Eric S. Raymond at his absolute best. Pretty much everyone who reads
HN needs to read and familiarise themselves with this book.

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monotypical
I appreciate the transparency of the author including links to negative
reviews on the page. Kudos for that.

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oneeyedpigeon
Magnificent book, but why now?

~~~
flatfilefan
Human generation update? :-) A lot of IT professional people I know here have
never heard about the book.

~~~
fizwhiz
Spot on, this is exactly why I posted it. I'm a relatively new programmer (~2
yrs into a corp gig), and for me to really grasp things at an intuitive level
it always helps me understand the context in which they are conceived. This
was an exceptional read to tie in the big picture so that I can further my
knowledge with a deeper understanding of "why" things are the way they are.

As an aside, my mind was blown that much of this was directly inspired by the
Multics project. It's really interesting that despite so many decades of
apparent advances between the early 60s and today, much of what the modern OSs
have are really the same.

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seanhandley
Maybe put the date in the title (2008)

