Nutshell book questions (Quality & Skill level)

[Rich Salz]

In <9059 at cbmvax.commodore.com> schein at cbmvax.UUCP (Dan Schein - Guest) writes:
>  Im curious if anyone has knowledge of the Nutshell (publisher) books
>  entitled, "Using C on the UNIX System" (ISBN 0-937175-34-4) $24.95 and
>  "Checking C Programs with lint" (ISBN 0-937175-30-7) $12.95. I received
>  a Nutshell book listing and was wondering what the quality and skill
>  level of these books are. 
...
>-- 
...  long .signature deleted ...

I've been meaning to write about this for awhile.

Checking C Programs with Lint is a very good buck.  I read it in our
corporate library.  I learned one or two little tricks, and since I'm
fairly expert on lint that came as a pleasant surprise.  The book is short
and to the point.  On the other hand, it is not very terse, and anyone
who's written a C program of more than one source file should be able to
read and learn from it.  For some reason it reminded me of The Elements of
Style, by Strunk and White.  Anyhow, I highly recommend it.

The only thing wrong with "Using C on the UNIX System" is the title, and I
understand that O'Reilly might change it.  The book was written by Dave
Curry, maintainer of the UNIX-SW archives on Simtel-20.  The man knows
what he's talking about.  It covers the raw file system (write your own
fsck), TTY drivers, Socket IPC, SysV IPC (not TLI), Network programming,
using PTY's, and job control (write your own shell).  There is a lot of
sample code in the book, and you can pick it up on-line from uunet.  One
program used printf inside a signal handler (asking for trouble, in
general, but seems safe in the context given).  I was disappointed by
Rockind's Advanced Unix Programming book; on the scale of things this
seems more like Kernighan and Pike's in terms of value.  Very highly
recommended.

Disclaimer:  I'm contracted to write a book for O'Reilly, but not on any
of these topics.
	/r$
-- 
Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz at uunet.uu.net.
Use a domain-based address or give alternate paths, or you may lose out.