The Unix Programming Environment (Prentice-Hall Software Series) First Edition

This book is truly amazing. This book is older than me, and yet it still is able to provide valuable insight into today's Linux systems.Being a Kerninghan book, the writing style is clean, simple, logical, and easy-to-follow. It's an excellent first or second book for new Unix users. It also provides good background/motivational information, which helps you to understand why things are the way they are.

Nice classic.In the fast moving computer industry, it is surprising that this old book still have relevant information for Unix.Authors are researchers from AT&T lab at the time and can feel the breath of OS creating research power.Unix is mostly regarded as unfriendly for Windows users.But, while reading this book, Unix feels easy and simple.I got to like the idea of pipe.It is ancient component model in text mode.

Use of acronyms made the book hard to read.

A friend recommended this book to me as a resource for learning how to do shell programming. It is really fabulous. I picked it up with little to no prior knowledge and quickly was making my own little personal programs to tweak my development environment.

A must have for anybody who really wants to get into the mindset of a developer living in a Unix/Linux world. I bought this copy of the book to give to a friend of mine who is a great java developer, but his lack of Unix/Shell knowledge was really holding him back at work. After only a week I am already noticing that he is much more efficient working on our Linux machines at work.

While it was written in 1984 - it cover the roots of unix when it was a simpler operating system. Thus, there are basics covered I feel are not easy to glean nowadays - details of quoting and command line atoms, how the control keys work, and my favorite - anonymous file handles. For the 4 chapters I have read so far, it has helped me immensely.It is not for the beginner unix person - some frustration must be experienced at the command line to really appreciate this book.

Brian W. Kernighan, of Bell Labs, was/is a prolific author to technical books on software development."The UNIX Programming Environment" shows the UNIX/Linux user how to get aroundon a UNIX/Linux system using the command line.Although the use of graphical user interfaces (GUI) have increased in popularity and functionality,the ability to use the command line interface (CLI) is still a very powerful way to access the computer.

This book is rather dated, but I have to say that I haven't seen another book which is as succinct and usable as this one. The professional should get Stevens' "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment", but for the occasional user, that book is way too intimidating. I think this book wears its years well.