Unix Programming Environment
(Prentice-Hall Software Series) by
Rob Pike
The Gold Standard!
Most of the book is devoted to discussions of individual tools, but
throughout run the themes of combining programs and of using programs
to build programs--emphasizing how they fit in the environment.
Personal Review: Unix Programming Environment (Prentice-
Hall Software Series) by Rob Pike
In spite of its advanced age, this book is still relevant and explains many
topics better than much newer books on the various flavors of UNIX.
Although there are better books on the specific flavors of UNIX available
today, no other book does as good a job of explaining the philosophy of
generic UNIX and its intrinsic relationship to the C programming language.
The book starts out talking about invoking common commands from the
command line, the UNIX file system, and then moves on to "filtering"-
which in this context means feeding the output of one command into the

input of another command until you obtain the output you desire. Next shell
programming is introduced along with sed and awk, which are the oldest of
the UNIX scripting languages. Finally, we exhaust what can be done with
sed, awk, and scripts consisting of UNIX commands already in existence.
So, the authors show us how to "roll our own" UNIX commands by writing
C programs and invoking their executable versions just like a UNIX
command would be invoked. This part of the book is not meant to be a
tutorial on the C programming language, so the reader should already
know C or have another source for learning it. As an addendum to the
section on C programming and UNIX, the authors illustrate how to use the
UNIX system calls to build a richer set of commands. These system calls
are interfaces to the UNIX OS kernel and provide a means for the
programmer/user to access I/O, create and access files and directories,
process errors, manage and create processes, and handle signals - which
are the UNIX version of interrupts and exceptions. The book closes with a
discussion of yacc and lex and illustrates how they can be used to build a
calculator for use in the UNIX environment.
This is a very "hands on" kind of book, so you should have access to a
UNIX based system that has a C compiler handy so that you can type in
the commands and do the exercises as you read along in the book. If you
are a beginner to the world of UNIX, regardless of the flavor that you are
ultimately interested in using, this is a great book to get your feet wet and
to understand the power of this operating system.
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