Advanced Programming in the UNIX(R) Environment (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

Unix Network Programming, Vol. 1: The Sockets Networking API, Third Edition

UNIX Network Programming, Volume 2: Interprocess Communications (2nd Edition)

Unix Systems Programming: Communication, Concurrency and Threads, Second Edition

The Art of UNIX Programming

Unix

Advanced UNIX Programming (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

Format: Paperback
Author: Marc J. Rochkind
ReleaseDate: 29 April, 2004
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Rating:

The best UNIX programming book that I know of
. What's more to say, the title say's it all.. Buy it!.

Good Coverage
The feature that Rochkind starts with may be the most problematic: portability. This is an exceptional introduction to Unix features that most people won't see in every-day programming. There have historically been dozens of Unices (sp?), all slightly different from each other. Even today, there are a number of different implementations in use, with small but maddening incompatibilities between them. Rochkind not only addresses the more common ones, he shows the standards-based ways of dealing with their differences.

After that, Rochkind goes over read/write/open/close/ioctl again, dealing with [a]synchronous subtleties that can mean a 100x difference in performance, backed by code samples and timing measurements. The rest of the book deals with multi-process applications, including communication and distributed processing issues. That includes process groups, interprocess communication (with all its system-dependent weirdness), sockets, and signals.

This isn't for the beginner or for the kernel developer, but never meant to be for either. It is a good, readable introduction to protentially tricky parts of the Unix API. I recommend it strongly to anyone building their own library of Unix references.

//wiredweird
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Just right
The text is clear but too verbose - you can actually finish this book, which I find important for programmers who want to get a sound introduction and then get to coding. This book starts at the beginning, assumes very little, and takes you quickly to the essentials you need to know about unix. The new edition is updated for modern unix-like systems.