Advanced UNIX Programming

[Peter Klosky]

XXX

Title:        The Unix Operating System
Author:       Kaare Christian
Publisher:    Wiley & Sons, 1983

This book has two very good chapters at the end, "System Manager's 
Utilities" and "The UNIX System Kernel."

The manager's section describes how to run cron, fsck, mknod, what
a setuid bit means, etc.  The author's style of writing makes
this book easy to read, even for non-programmers.

The kernel chapter is good in terms of explaining data structures such 
as what is a u area, how do the file structs point at inodes, etc.
The author takes the time to explain each task that must be performed
in order to open ../a/b so that actual people can understand.
He is kind enough to explain such subtle things such as 
what is the purpose of the cdevsw and bdevsw array and how conf.c
fits into the scheme.

My only complaint is that the two decent chapters of the book
are too short;  too bad he had to spend so many chapters explaining
how to write shell scripts and use ed.