There is a vast difference between knowledge and expertise. Knowledge lets you deduce the right thing to do; expertise makes the right thing a reflex, hardly requiring conscious thought at all. This book has a lot of knowledge in it, but it is mainly about expertise. It is going to try to teach you the things about Unix development that Unix experts know, but aren't aware that they know. It is therefore less about technicalia and more about shared culture than most Unix books — both explicit and implicit culture, both conscious and unconscious traditions. It is not a ‘how-to’ book, it is a ‘why-to’ book. The why-to has great practical importance, because far too much software is poorly designed. Much of it suffers from bloat, is exceedingly hard to maintain, and is too difficult to port to new platforms or extend in ways the original programmers didn't anticipate. These problems are symptoms of bad design. We hope that readers of this book will learn something of what Unix has to teach about good design.

The Linux Development Platform

The Linux Development Platform shows how to choose the best open source and GNU development tools for your specific needs, and integrate them into a complete development environment that maximizes your effectiveness in any project. It covers editors, compilers, assemblers, debuggers, version control, utilities, LSB, Java, cross-platform solutions, and the entire Linux software development process.

Programming Linux Games

Linux is a great operating system for developers, and even for casual users who don't mind the initial learning curve. But until recently, Linux has been lousy for gaming. This isn't due to any technical shortcoming; Linux has plenty of performance and stability to support high-performance multimedia applications. It did, however, lack support from game developers. Thanks to portable game programming toolkits like SDL and OpenAL, this is beginning to change.

The Linux Cookbook

Tips and Techniques for Everyday Use.

Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition

As the popularity of the Linux system continues to grow, the interest in writing Linux device drivers steadily increases. Most of Linux is independent of the hardware it runs on, and most users can be (happily) unaware of hardware issues. But, for each piece of hardware supported by Linux, somebody somewhere has written a driver to make it work with the system. Without device drivers, there is no functioning system. Device drivers take on a special role in the Linux kernel. They are distinct 'black boxes' that make a particular piece of hardware respond to a well-defined internal programming interface; they hide completely the details of how the device works. User activities are performed by means of a set of standardized calls that are independent of the specific driver; mapping those calls to device-specific operations that act on real hardware is then the role of the device driver. This programming interface is such that drivers can be built separately from the rest of the kernel, and 'plugged in' at runtime when needed. This modularity makes Linux drivers easy to write, to the point that there are now hundreds of them available.

FreeBSD Handbook

The FreeBSD newcomer will find that the first section of this book guides the user through the FreeBSD installation process and gently introduces the concepts and conventions that underpin UNIX. Working through this section requires little more than the desire to explore, and the ability to take on board new concepts as they are introduced. Once you have traveled this far, the second, far larger, section of the Handbook is a comprehensive reference to all manner of topics of interest to FreeBSD system administrators. Some of these chapters may recommend that you do some prior reading, and this is noted in the synopsis at the beginning of each chapter.

UNIX Network Programming

Book Info Volume 1: Networking APIs: Sockets and XTI. Author offers unprecedented, start-to-finish guidance on making the most of sockets, the de facto standard for Unix network programming, as well as extensive coverage of the X/Open Transport Interface (XTI). DLC: Unix (Computer file)

Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition

This is the web site for the Third Edition of Linux Device Drivers, by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, and Greg Kroah-Hartman. For the moment, only the finished PDF files are available; we do intend to make an HTML version and the DocBook source available as well.

An Introduction to GCC

An introduction to the GNU C and C++ Compilers, gcc and g++, which are part of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)

UNIX System Calls and Subroutines using C.