The first edition of this book was originally published in 1993 by
John Wiley under the same name, Advanced Topics in UNIX. It was
named an Alternate Main Selection of the Newbridge Book Club in the
same year. That book stayed in print for thirteen years, an
eternity in the computing literature. Due to changes in the
publishing industry, this edition of the book is only available
electronically. I was motivated to revise the book because of the
increased popularity of several variants of UNIX and on what I
learned from reviews of the previous published version of this
book. Linux has become increasingly popular, due in no little part
to it being so popular in the open source community and also
because it is serving as the basis of the operating system for the
Google Android phone. The Mach operating system, originally
developed at Carnegie Mellon University, is the basis for the
operating systems used to control Apple Macintosh computers.
Solaris, originally developed by Sun Microsystems, is now
considered by Oracle to be the top enterprise operating system and
also claimed to have been especially built for cloud computing. It
was clear to me that a revision of the book was necessary. I am
currently running versions of both Linux (Ubuntu) and Solaris on my
Windows PC. Of course, the operating system on my Macintosh is
based on Mach. My experience with multiple versions of UNIX-like
operating systems showed me that end users, application
programmers, system programmers, and system administrators often
had difficulties in making programs and utilities work well across
different UNIX variants, due to differences in file system
organization, different locations of critical configuration files,
and important, yet subtle, differences in how system calls operate.
There are also issues with different utilities, many of which are
either not available on all UNIX versions, or else require a
substantial effort to even get them to install properly. One of the
most interesting problems required detailed analysis of several
Linux variants in order to get a single public domain application
to work - the different Linux variants from Fedora (formerly Red
Hat), SUSE, and Ubuntu were examined before the application would
install and work properly. Many second editions dump material from
older technologies. I have chosen a different approach, guided by
my own research and experience in the efficient development of
large, high-quality, software systems in both UNIX and non-UNIX
environments over much of the last twenty-five years. Much of my
research in this area is based on the application of systematic
approaches to software reuse as part of the software development
process. In fact, I chose to produce a second edition of my book
Software Reuse: Methods, Models, Costs before I began revising this
book, Advanced Topics in UNIX. What is the relevance of software
reuse to a book on UNIX? A huge percentage of current software
applications for UNIX and other operating systems are built using
existing software components that are either partially or entirely
reused. Older software components necessarily have been built using
older technology and are likely to use some of the older system
calls as well as newly created calls. You need to understand the
differences in different generations of system calls and their
behavior if you are redeploying existing software components. That
is, after all, the reason for learning system calls if you are an
applications programmer. The same holds true for systems-level
programming, especially kernel-level programming, since operating
systems are rarely written from scratch. There are 11 chapters:
Introduction to UNIX, The User Interface, Input and Output, UNIX
File Systems, Introduction to Processes, Memory and Process
Management, Introduction to Interprocess Communication, The System
V IPC Package, Signals, Sockets, and RPC, IPC Comparison, and
Fault-Tolerant UNIX Software.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
