Advanced UNIX Programming

[Bill Poser]

	I won't venture a proper review, but I've bought the book and read
most of it, on the basis of which I recommend it. It's very clear and well
written and contains discussions of a lot of things that I have had to learn by
reading the manuals and experimenting. The title is very accurate: it
doesn't tell you anything about UNIX internals or implementation details;
it's about programming (and assumes a knowledge of C) on a UNIX system.
Unlike many other more elementary UNIX books it has little to say about
shell programming or use of UNIX utilities. In this sense it is largely
complementary to Kernighan & Pike's "The UNIX Programming Environment".
What it is really about is how to use the services provided by the kernel,
i.e. how to use system calls. I think it does a good job of this.
It is organized functionally, with chapters on such topics as signals,
semaphores, process management, and terminal i/o. In addition to overviews,
many sections begin with synopses of the relevant system calls followed by
explanations of their use.
	I haven't thus far encountered any inaccuracies, though I don't
know all of the versions of UNIX covered or everything abut the ones I am
familiar with. My only complaints are matters
of ommission. The book is oriented more toward AT&T UNIX than toward Berkeley
UNIX, and the discussion of some topics is restricted to non-Berkeley
versions of UNIX; for example, there is no discussion of signals in 4.2BSD.
The authors do at least tell you when what they have to say does not
apply to some version(s) of UNIX.
	The other thing that I would have liked to see is somewhat more
attention to low-level systems programming, e.g. device drivers and other
kinds of real-time applications. There is a rather heavy emphasis on
inter-process communication, with a lot of discussion of issues related
to DBMS implementation.
	Although it doesn't cover everything I'd like to know more about,
I definitely recommend it for what it does cover.
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