Table of Contents
I. CONTEXT.
1. Philosophy.
Culture? What culture? The durability of Unix. The case against
learning Unix culture. What Unix gets wrong. What Unix gets right.
Basics of the Unix philosophy.
The Unix philosophy in one
lesson.
Applying the Unix philosophy. Attitude matters too.
2.
History.
Origins and history of Unix, 1969-1995. Origins and history of the
hackers, 1961-1995. The open-source movement: 1998 and onward. The
lessons of Unix history.
3. Contrasts.
The elements of operating-system style. Operating-system
comparisons. What goes around, comes around.
II. DESIGN.
4. Modularity.
Encapsulation and optimal module size. Compactness and
orthogonality. Libraries. Unix and object-oriented languages.
Coding for modularity.
5. Textuality.
The Importance of Being Textual. Data file metaformats. Application
protocol design. Application protocol metaformats.
6.
Transparency.
Some case studies. Designing for transparency and discoverability.
Designing for maintainability.
7. Multiprogramming.
Separating complexity control from performance tuning. Taxonomy of
Unix IPC methods. Problems and methods to avoid. Process
partitioning at the design level.
8. Minilanguages.
Taxonomy of languages. Applying minilanguages. Designing
minilanguages.
9. Transformation.
Data-driven programming. Ad-hoc code generation.
10.
Configuration.
What should be configurable? Where configurations live.
Promotional Information
The Art of UNIX Programming poses the belief that understanding the
unwritten UNIX engineering tradition and mastering its design
patterns will help programmers of all stripes to become better
programmers. This book attempts to capture the engineering wisdom
and design philosophy of the UNIX, Linux, and Open Source software
development community as it has evolved over the past three
decades, and as it is applied today by the most experienced
programmers. Eric Raymond offers the next generation of "hackers"
the unique opportunity to learn the connection between UNIX
philosophy and practice through careful case studies of the very
best UNIX/Linux programs.
About the Author
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 in The
Cathedral and the Bazaar and is the editor of The New Hacker's
Dictionary.
