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 Features - September
1999 - Book review III
Phil Edwards reviews UNIX system programming by Keith
Haviland, Dina Gray and Ben Salama, and Linux companion for system administrators by
Jochen Hein.
Keith Haviland, Dina Gray and Ben Salama, UNIX
system programming (Addison-Wesley, £27.95)
Jochen Hein, Linux companion for system administrators (Addison-Wesley, £31.95)
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Unix books in NTexplorer? Some mistake, surely?
It’s true that these books will not be of interest to all NTexplorer readers.
However, if you’re concerned about communicating with Unix machines on a network
(e.g. the Internet), or if you want to know more about the biggest single threat to
NT’s market position, Linux and other flavours of Unix can’t be ignored.
It’s also worth noting that Windows 2000 brings Microsoft perceptibly closer to the
Unix world: if you’re getting ready to deal with the next generation of Windows,
getting a grounding in Unix concepts and facilities could be useful preparation.
Like Ron Petrusha, Haviland, Gray and Salama concentrates on the ‘how’ rather
than the ‘what’: you won’t find a listing of Unix command-line functions
here. What this book does provide, in exhaustive detail, is an explanation of how Unix
works: how the file system is organised, how processes execute, how Unix machines
communicate over networks and what standard libraries are provided. Like Unix, the
organisation of the book is both logical and idiosyncratic, devoting 150 pages to
‘the file’ and ‘the process’ before acknowledging the existence of
‘inter-process communication’. Even in the second chapter (‘The File’)
the reader is asked to digest twenty pages on ‘the Unix file access primitives’
(the internal mechanisms for reading and writing files) before the basic concept of
‘standard output’ is introduced. (By default, all Unix processes direct output
to the screen; knowing how to stop this happening is a fairly fundamental part of learning
to programme.)
Apart from this cavil, the book is hard to fault: detailed, lucid and unflinchingly
thorough. As such it will serve two audiences. For anyone with access to a Unix system and
the appropriate levels of time and dedication it is an incomparable ‘teach
yourself’ textbook - indeed, there are exercises throughout. It will also be a good
reference text for anyone whose questions about Unix go beyond ‘for Dummies’
level.
Jochen Hein’s Linux companion is a little more ambitious. In 26 chapters and
four appendices, Hein covers... well, just about everything: from the programming
utilities awk and sed to national language support; from ‘TCP/IP basics’ to
‘Why everybody needs backups’; from the history of X Windows to the differences
between Linux and other Unix file systems. As well as a six-page bibliography, there are
references throughout to Web sites, newsgroups, FTP servers and mailing lists: Hein is an
enthusiast, and wants more people to share his enthusiasm. As chatty and informal as
Petrusha’s book, as comprehensive as Siyan’s, this book is a rare phenomenon: an
encyclopaedia written by a fan. |
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