MARC J. ROCHKIND was fortunate enough to have worked at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s, when UNIX was still in its infancy. It was there that Rochkind made several key contributions to UNIX, notably the Source Code Control System. He wrote the first edition of Advanced UNIX Programming in 1984. This complete revision benefits from his years of post-Bell application systems development experience.
The classic guide to UNIX® programming-completely updated!
UNIX application programming requires a mastery of system-level services. Making sense of the many functions-more than 1,100 functions in the current UNIX specification-is a daunting task, so for years programmers have turned to Advanced UNIX Programming for its clear, expert advice on how to use the key functions reliably.
An enormous number of changes have taken place in the UNIX environment since the landmark first edition. In Advanced UNIX Programming, Second Edition, UNIX pioneer Marc J. Rochkind brings the book fully up to date, with all-new, comprehensive coverage including:
- POSIX
- Solaris™
- Linux®
- FreeBSD
- Darwin, the Mac™ OS X kernel
- And more than 200 new system calls
Rochkind's fully updated classic explains all the UNIX system calls you're likely to need, all in a single volume!
- Interprocess communication, networking (sockets), pseudo terminals, asynchronous I/O, advanced signals, realtime, and threads
- Covers the system calls you'll actually use-no need to plow through hundreds of improperly implemented, obsolete, and otherwise unnecessary system calls!
- Thousands of lines of example code include a Web browser and server, a keystroke recorder/player, and a shell complete with pipelines, redirection, and background processes
- Emphasis on the practical-ensuring portability, avoiding pitfalls, and much more!
Since 1985, the one book to have for mastering UNIX application programming has been Rochkind's Advanced UNIX Programming. Now completely updated, the second edition remains the choice for up-to-the-minute, in-depth coverage of the essential system-level services of the UNIX family of operating systems.
Preface
This book updates the 1985 edition of Advanced UNIX Programming to cover a few changes that have occurred in the last eighteen years. Well, maybe "few" isn't the right word! And "updates" isn't right either. Indeed, aside from a sentence here and there, this book is all new. The first edition included about 70 system calls; this one includes about 300. And none of the UNIX standards and imple-mentations discussed in this book--POSIX, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, and Darwin (Mac OS X)--were even around in 1985. A few sentences from the 1985 Preface, however, are among those that I can leave almost unchanged:The subject of this book is UNIX system calls--the interface between the UNIX kernel and the user programs that run on top of it. Those who interact only with commands, like the shell, text editors, and other application programs, may have little need to know much about system calls, but a thorough knowledge of them is essential for UNIX programmers. System calls are the only way to access kernel facilities such as the file system, the multitasking mechanisms, and the interprocess communication primitives.
System calls define what UNIX is. Everything else--subroutines and commands--is built on this foundation. While the novelty of many of these higher-level programs has been responsi-ble for much of UNIX's renown, they could as well have been programmed on any modern operating system. When one describes UNIX as elegant, simple, efficient, reliable, and porta-ble, one is referring not to the commands (some of which are none of these things), but to the kernel.That's all still true, except that, regrettably, the programming inter
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