Here are 39 books that Unix Power Tools fans have personally recommended if you like
Unix Power Tools.
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Like most geeks, I've always loved efficiency and productivity. Coming from a Windows-dominated world, the command line I was faced with in my CompSci degree was Initially mystifying, but over time I have come to see it as the most powerful human-computer interface out there. After spending years wresting with the command line at work, I decided to write a book on bash, and have blogged extensively on this and related topics. I also run live courses on bash and the command line for O'Reilly. There's nothing I enjoy more than opening people's eyes to the power of the shell!
Regular expressions are the cornerstone of command line wizardry.
They are used in pretty much all command-line tools, and all programming languages.
If you read this book, you'll have a deep understanding of what's going on, and the knowledge to go from hand-waving and guessing your way through regular expression writing to the mastery the book promises.
Regular expressions are an extremely powerful tool for manipulating text and data. They are now standard features in a wide range of languages and popular tools, including Perl, Python, Ruby, Java, VB.NET and C# (and any language using the .NET Framework), PHP, and MySQL. If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regular expressions, this book is a stunning eye-opener.…
Like most geeks, I've always loved efficiency and productivity. Coming from a Windows-dominated world, the command line I was faced with in my CompSci degree was Initially mystifying, but over time I have come to see it as the most powerful human-computer interface out there. After spending years wresting with the command line at work, I decided to write a book on bash, and have blogged extensively on this and related topics. I also run live courses on bash and the command line for O'Reilly. There's nothing I enjoy more than opening people's eyes to the power of the shell!
For a few years, I had a copy of this book on my desk, and would flick through it in spare moments, gradually absorbing all the minutiae of grep's options in the hope they would be useful to me one day.
You can get some idea of the book's utility from the fact that I had to regularly buy a new copy because someone would 'borrow' it and not give it back.
"Grep Pocket Reference" is the first guide devoted to grep, the powerful utility program that helps you locate content in any file on a Unix or Linux system. Several applications use grep, from mail filtering and system log management to malware analysis and application development, and there are many other ways to use the utility. This pocket reference is ideal for system administrators, security professionals, developers, and others who want to learn more about grep and take new approaches with it.With "Grep Pocket Reference", you will: learn methods for filtering large files for specific content; acquire information not included in…
Like most geeks, I've always loved efficiency and productivity. Coming from a Windows-dominated world, the command line I was faced with in my CompSci degree was Initially mystifying, but over time I have come to see it as the most powerful human-computer interface out there. After spending years wresting with the command line at work, I decided to write a book on bash, and have blogged extensively on this and related topics. I also run live courses on bash and the command line for O'Reilly. There's nothing I enjoy more than opening people's eyes to the power of the shell!
In 2001, when I was young and everything was possible I asked my CTO what Interactive Development Environment (IDE) I should use.
'vim' was the response, so I went away and learned it. To this day, I use vim by default for almost all my programming needs. The learning curve is very steep, but the rewards are great, not least because it's hard to find a platform that cannot run it.
This book reinforces the learning you can do elsewhere through walkthroughs and tips and lets you know what's possible, so that when you really need to do things like search and replace, or run a macro, you can look it up again and get it under your fingers.
Vim is a fast and efficient text editor that will make you a faster and more efficient developer. It's available on almost every OS, and if you master the techniques in this book, you'll never need another text editor. In more than 120 Vim tips, you'll quickly learn the editor's core functionality and tackle your trickiest editing and writing tasks. This beloved bestseller has been revised and updated to Vim 7.4 and includes two brand-new tips and five fully revised tips.A highly configurable, cross-platform text editor, Vim is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins who want to…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
Like most geeks, I've always loved efficiency and productivity. Coming from a Windows-dominated world, the command line I was faced with in my CompSci degree was Initially mystifying, but over time I have come to see it as the most powerful human-computer interface out there. After spending years wresting with the command line at work, I decided to write a book on bash, and have blogged extensively on this and related topics. I also run live courses on bash and the command line for O'Reilly. There's nothing I enjoy more than opening people's eyes to the power of the shell!
After using sed and awk for years in ad hoc one-liners I'd either Googled, or been given I decided to study them properly.
Reading this book was not time wasted, as I saw how powerful these two tools could be, and have used them ever since. From the serious to the whimsical, each section concisely teaches you something significant.
I haven't read it in years, and I'm going to read it again straight after writing this!
sed & awk describes two text processing programs that are mainstays of the UNIX programmer's toolbox. sed is a "stream editor" for editing streams of text that might be too large to edit as a single file, or that might be generated on the fly as part of a larger data processing step. The most common operation done with sed is substitution, replacing one block of text with another. awk is a complete programming language. Unlike many conventional languages, awk is "data driven" -- you specify what kind of data you are interested in and the operations to be performed…
Dr. Jeremy Kepner is head and founder of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center (LLSC), and also a Founder of the MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator. Lincoln Laboratory is a 4000-person National Laboratory whose mission is to create defensive technologies to protect our Nation and the freedoms enshrined in the Constitution of the United States. Dr. Kepner is one of five Lincoln Laboratory Fellows, a position that "recognizes the Laboratory's strongest technical talent for outstanding contributions to Laboratory programs over many years." Dr. Kepner is recognized as one of nine MIT Fellows of the Society of Industrial Applied Mathematics (SIAM), for "contributions to interactive parallel computing, matrix-based graph algorithms, green supercomputing, and big data."
Unix/Linux has emerged as the most common operating system in the world. Found on almost every server, smartphone, and network-enabled device, Unix plays a critical role in all aspects of computing. Unix for the Beginning Mage is a fun introduction to Unix for the novice who may be intimidated by other texts.
I am a professional software developer and technical author, with a number of books published by O’Reilly and Prentice Hall. I have been working in the C / C++ / Unix / Linux world for over four decades. I am also the maintainer of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Awk interpreter for the awk programming language. I have a passion for writing clear, correct, efficient, and portable code, and for applying the UNIX and Software Tools principles in my development. I hope that this book list will help you climb the learning curve of doing great Unix / Linux development.
This book looks at UNIX System V Release 2 and Release 3, describing a more modern version of Unix. It presents pseudo code of the internal algorithms with diagrams of the major data structures used by the system.
Here too, knowing how the operating system works will help you write better code to take advantage of the services provided to you.
Supposedly, Linus Torvalds read this book before he produced the first Linux kernel!
In this timely new book, Maurice J. Bach traces the popularity of the UNIX system throughout the computer industry. The author describes the internal algorithms and structures that form the basis of the operating system (the kernel) and their relationship to the programmer interface. Among its key features, the book: *Describes the outline of the kernel architecture *Introduces the system buffer cache mechanism *Includes data structures and algorithms used internally by the file system *Covers the system calls that provide the user interface to the file system *Defines the context of a process and investigates the internal kernel primitives that…
I am a professional software developer and technical author, with a number of books published by O’Reilly and Prentice Hall. I have been working in the C / C++ / Unix / Linux world for over four decades. I am also the maintainer of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Awk interpreter for the awk programming language. I have a passion for writing clear, correct, efficient, and portable code, and for applying the UNIX and Software Tools principles in my development. I hope that this book list will help you climb the learning curve of doing great Unix / Linux development.
Modern Unix systems (including Linux) offer a wealth of APIs. This book provides detailed instruction, including sample code, on how to make the best use of them. It is a one-stop-shop for mastering the details of Unix programming in C.
I recommend the book because it is thorough, authoritative, and clearly written. Richard Stevens was a well-known author and consultant and his books are models of clear exposition. Steven Rago is an experienced Unix developer and author as well.
For more than twenty years, serious C programmers have relied on one book for practical, in-depth knowledge of the programming interfaces that drive the UNIX and Linux kernels: W. Richard Stevens' Advanced Programming in the UNIX (R) Environment. Now, once again, Rich's colleague Steve Rago has thoroughly updated this classic work. The new third edition supports today's leading platforms, reflects new technical advances and best practices, and aligns with Version 4 of the Single UNIX Specification.
Steve carefully retains the spirit and approach that have made this book so valuable. Building on Rich's pioneering work, he begins with files, directories,…
I am a professional software developer and technical author, with a number of books published by O’Reilly and Prentice Hall. I have been working in the C / C++ / Unix / Linux world for over four decades. I am also the maintainer of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Awk interpreter for the awk programming language. I have a passion for writing clear, correct, efficient, and portable code, and for applying the UNIX and Software Tools principles in my development. I hope that this book list will help you climb the learning curve of doing great Unix / Linux development.
The previous books all cover programming at the user level – how to write regular programs for a Unix / Linux system. But what about the operating system itself?
This classic work explains the operating system code of the 6th Edition Unix system, which ran on Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11 systems. If you want to learn the basics of operating system implementation by reading real, working code, this is the place to start.
This is worth reading, even if you never intend to write kernel code, since an understanding of how the operating system works makes it easier for you to correctly use the system calls (APIs) that the operating system provides.
The most famous suppressed book in computer history! * Used as an Operating System textbook at MIT"After 20 years, this is still the best expostion of the workings of a 'real' operating system." --- Ken Thompson (Developer of the UNIX operating system)After years of suppression (as trade secrets) by various owners of the UNIX code, this tome has been re-released, and we owe a debt to all involved in making this happen. I consider this to be the single most important book of 1996. Unix Review, June 1997"The Lions book", cherished by UNIX hackers and widely circulated as a photocopied…
The art of computer programming is a lot like the art of writing: It's not just about what your program says but about how it says it. One of the reasons I like the C and C++ languages—which I picked up in the late 1990s and haven't put down since—is that, as compiled, non-sandboxed languages, they promise total control over the machine. Show me where you want each byte of data to go in memory; show me the machine instructions you want; and I can make C++ do that for you.
Next to Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month, this is perhaps the most classic of all classic programming books.
The authors write: "Besides showing how to make effective use of the language, we have also tried where possible to illustrate useful algorithms and principles of good style and sound design."
The book is astoundingly practical as a tutorial, which is itself a testament to the Unix "pipe" model of programming: By page 13, they've introduced getchar and putchar, and by the end of Chapter 1, twenty pages later, you've implemented a host of useful utilities including cat, wc, and detab. In Chapter 5 you implement a function recognizable as the now-standard qsort; in Chapter 8 you implement malloc itself.
Now, I recommend "K&R1," not the more popular "K&R2." The first edition was issued in 1978 at a slim 225 pages; the second edition, a decade later, added conformance with ANSI…
Known as the bible of C, this classic bestseller introduces the C programming language and illustrates algorithms, data structures, and programming techniques.
My life has been about programming for as long as I can remember. Learning to code was a way to connect with my dad and express my creativity at a young age. Since I grew up with code, it became the way I understood the world; often I could look at a process or program and immediately see its source code in my mind. I developed a very strong sense of aesthetics searching for “perfect code,” which for me was code that was not only error-free but resistant to errors. My studies, research, and career is about moving myself and all programmers closer to that goal: Software that never fails.
Continuing down the engineering part of this mini-curriculum, we have a collection of interesting ideas, each written by a different author, all of them inspiring.
Some of the chapters in this book I have reread more times than I can count, because the ideas are so original and intriguing that my fingers start to tingle.
How do the experts solve difficult problems in software development? In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts to see problems through their eyes. This is not simply another design patterns book, or another software engineering treatise on the right and wrong way to do things. The authors think aloud as they work through their project's architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to…
