The Art of UNIX Programming

ERIC S. RAYMOND has been a Unix developer since 1982. Known as the resident anthropologist and roving ambassador of the open-source community, he wrote the movement's manifesto inThe Cathedral and the Bazaarand is the editor ofThe New Hacker's Dictionary.

"Reading this book has filled a gap in my education. I feel a sense of completion, understand that UNIX is really a style of community. Now I get it, at least I get it one level deeper than I ever did before. This book came at a perfect moment for me, a moment when I shifted from visualizing programs as things to programs as the shadows cast by communities. From this perspective, Eric makes UNIX make perfect sense."
--Kent Beck, author ofExtreme Programming Explained, Test Driven Development, andContributing to Eclipse

"A delightful, fascinating read, and the lessons in problem-solvng are essential to every programmer, on any OS."
--Bruce Eckel, author ofThinking in JavaandThinking in C++

Writing better software: 30 years of UNIX development wisdom

In this book, five years in the making, the author encapsulates three decades of unwritten, hard-won software engineering wisdom. Raymond brings together for the first time the philosophy, design patterns, tools, culture, and traditions that make UNIX home to the world's best and most innovative software, and shows how these are carried forward in Linux and today's open-source movement. Using examples from leading open-source projects, he shows UNIX and Linux programmers how to apply this wisdom in building software that's more elegant, more portable, more reusable, and longer-lived.

Raymond incorporates commentary from thirteen UNIX pioneers:

• Ken Thompson, the inventor of UNIX.
• Ken Arnold, part of the group that created the 4BSD UNIX releases and co-author ofThe Java Programming Language.
• Steven M. Bellovin, co-creator of Usenet and co-author ofFirewalls and Internet Security.
• Stuart Feldman, a member of the Bell Labs UNIX development group and the author ofmakeandf77.
• Jim Gettys and Keith Packard, principal architects of the X windowing system.
• Steve Johnson, author ofyaccand of the Portable C Compiler.
• Brian Kernighan, co-author ofThe C Programming Language, The UNIX Programming Environment, The Practice of Programming,and of theawkprogramming language.
• David Korn, creator of thekornshell and author ofThe New Korn Shell Command and Programming Language.
• Mike Lesk, a member of the Bell Labs development group and author of themsmacro package, thetblandrefertools,lexandUUCP.
• Doug McIlroy, Director of the Bell Labs research group where UNIX was born and inventor of the UNIX pipe.
• Marshall Kirk McKusick, developer of the 4.2BSD fast filesystem and a leader of the 4.3BSD and 4.4BSD teams.
• Henry Spencer, a leader among early UNIX developers, who createdgetopt, the first open-source string library, and a regular-expression engine used in 4.4BSD.

Preface

Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.—Neal Stephenson

There is a vast difference between knowledge and expertise. Knowledge lets you deduce the right thing to do; expertise makes the right thing a reflex, hardly requiring conscious thought at all.

This book has a lot of knowledge in it, but it is mainly about expertise. It is going to try to teach you the things about Unix development that Unix experts know, but aren't aware that they know. It is therefore less about technicalia and more about shared culture than most Unix books — both explicit and implicit culture, both conscious and unconscious traditions. It is << less