[H-GEN] Books on architecture of Unix

[Greg Black]

On 2003-05-17, Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> Ben Fowler <fowlerb at optushome.com.au> writes:

> > I'm after a book which will give me a pretty decent understanding of
> > the internals of a modern Unix operating system (short of reading the
> > actual source code, of course).
> 
> I heartily recommend Stevens's Advanced Programming in the Unix
> Environment (I think that's the title).  After my copy became lost
> some years ago I have been looking to replace it but sadly I've never
> seen it on sale for a price close to what was paid for it originally.
> 
> In any event I thought it was *excellent*.  It may not fit your needs
> and expectations, though---spend some time with it first to check.

I still think the book I recommended by McKusick et al. is the
closest to what was asked for, but I would also recommend this
one by Stevens, modulo some egregious programming errors[1]
which do spoil it.  It's fat (almost 750 pages), cheap (my copy
was $51.95) and covers lots of practical programming material.

If you know enough to spot the errors as you read it, you may
not need the book -- although it may still serve as a useful
reference in certain circumstances.  Of course, if you don't
know enough to spot the errors, then you're stuck with other
books which I might not recommend at all ...

Greg

[1] Since somebody will ask, look at Program 10.1 for an example
    of a signal handler that is plain wrong.  There are other
    examples, but I'll leave them as an exercise for the reader.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
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