Programming Books

Transformational Speaking presents a spiritual path in a how-to book - what a rare find! It's beautifully written, passionate, and totally authentic. Gail is someone you WANT to learn from, and has so much to share. Her teaching is filled with depth and presence, and makes you realize that a podium is a meditation cushion in disguise. And vice versa, too. Become a better speaker, Gail's way, and you're bound to find more than a little enlightenment along the way.

TRANSFORMATIONAL SPEAKING
If you want to change the world, tell a better story...
Gail Larsen

Transformational Speaking literally transformed me as I worked my way through the book. Filled with the heart-wisdom of a woman who knows her territory and exercises that help you go straight to the core of who you are, this book will transform you too . . . if you let it.

This is true if you are a beginning speaker or a speaking pro. Gail makes you think, first about yourself: what are my innate talents and gifts; what is my core message? Our lives contain the answers. That alone is worth much more than the price of the book.

And just when you believe there is nothing left she has to tell you she comes in with: know your audience, "relive don't remember", the nuts and bolts information of the business of speaking.

This is a real human being demonstrating what she is writing about. Do I need to say more? Yes! I strongly urge you to buy the book. Read
Transformational Speaking if you want to find your voice, be your most powerful self, contribute your best gifts to the world and, of course, be a transformational speaker.

Reviewed by:

Lynda Klau, PHD
Licensed psychologist, coach, speaker

Gail's book is inspirational. She gives you tips that show you how to be the kind of speaker you like to hear. It takes courage to show up real and share your own wisdom; Gail helps you find that courage and wisdom and then how to share it in a winning way. Great book. Anyone who is a speaker or wants to become a great speaker should read her book.

Reading Transformation Speaking, I was astonished to learn that even though I was an experienced speaker I had been largely suppressing my core emotional message, or the most passionate and authentic part of myself with the highest potential to move others. Transformational Speaking has given me the confidence to dare to allow all of my humanness to come through when I address an audience, and to speak from the truth of my own story. When I finished the book, I couldn't wait for the next speaking opportunity to step into my power and potential as a change agent. I also especially enjoyed perusing the book's long list of `Qualities of A Great Speaker', as well as the 266 `Voices' one might express, which helped me to get clear on exactly who I most want to be when speaking. Highly recommended reading for anyone wanting to have an impact through public speaking. It will teach you the importance of transforming your relationship with yourself so you can become a truly transformational speaker--something missing from all other public speaking programs I have experienced. Bravo!

Camilla Rees
Wide Angle Health, LLC

although this isn't my favorite pascal book, it's a good textbook without any major flaws.

EDIT: pascal is a dead language. for a simple but useful language, try Delphi (based on pascl) or Visual Basic.

This was my textbook for Pascal at the University at Central Florida. It has helped me through Computer Science I and II. It is well written and easy to understand. It helps for both the beginner and advanced programmers. This is a need for anyone who programs in Pascal.

I will definitely be purchasing other books from this author. He has a very direct, and extremely clear way of explaining what would have otherwise been confusing principles.

The High School I attended used this book for its first-year programming course. It is well written, and clearly explains all of the basic concepts, without leaving out any of the more complex parts of the language

As a matter of fact I'm not an UML fan nor I particularly favour unified process. Indeed, I'm much more into Agile Development and XP.

The authors do not try to explain why unified process should be better than other processes. They just describe the method: It's up to the reader to decide which parts of the method are good or bad for his job. The reader is not bored with long enthusiastic comments on how he will be a more capable engineer after learning UML and UP. Unified Process is described in an unbiased and precise way: even those who do not favour UP may gather new and interesting ideas to incorporate in their development method.

The approach on UML is even more interesting. The basic ideas is that graphics should be a view, but what matters is text (which *is* something that the UML creators *did* think). Far to many lesser books focus on diagrams and miss to explain the interesting part is their semantics and their descriptions. Indeed, I try not to use UML unless I'm rather sure it's the best way to express a given concept: this book is a helpful reference on how to write correct and practical specifications using UML.

This is a great useful book.

Before reading this book I read "The Unified Modeling Language User Guide". I can say that "The Unified Modeling Language User Guide" is about the theory and "UML 2 and the Unified Process..." is about practice.

I think that both books are must for UML beginners and reference for the UML professionals.

In "UML 2 and the Unified Process.." authors show UML in action within the Unified Process, a framework for software development. The book describes how to analyze and design a software by giving a real example. Given examples are also complete and available online.

The language of the book is simple (easy to understand) and its contents is organized very well.

This book gave me an insight about the UML and also introduced me to the Unified Process. I would recommend it with 5+ stars to everybody.

UML has grown. A few years ago, when UML was just getting accepted, a book on how to use it would have been much thinner. But the successful broad uptake of UML led to its semantic notation being expanded. What the authors give us here is a thorough exposition of UML 2.0 and how to use it.

As you might expect, there are numerous examples in UML. Which, to many readers, might be more understandable than a mere abstract diagram. But the book is more than just about explaining the UML semantics. It also goes into the Unified Process for running a project, and how this can be documented in UML. By doing so, the authors hope to better enable an understanding of both.

There is also something else, related to the above, but sufficiently different and important to warrant notice. If you write in any object oriented language, it requires certain skills in designing classes and how they interact. Part 4 of the book concerns these issues, which it discusses under the rubric of "Design". A good explanation of the basic concepts. Like inheritance versus aggregation, or inheritance versus interfaces. Or why the lack of multiple inheritance in a language like C# or Java is not necessarily a deficiency.

This book gives a good introduction into modern software enigeering and I think that especially the first chapters about basics in object orientation and how the whole process works should be read by every person participating in a software project. I think these chapters are also worth reading for non computer science people.

It's too bad that this book isn't available new anymore. It's easy to gauge its value by the price it's holding as a used book. I'm the moderator of the yahoo motioncapture group, and this book was the stepping stone for me to begin developing my own motion capture system. This book is so useful, that I've got two copies. That way I can lend one to a friend, and keep one handy to solve the hard problems that come up as I develop my system. There are a couple of newer books that cover the basics, but if you want to get into the technical details of how it's done, this is still the reference to use. If you are a provider or consumer of mocap, this book covers both points of view and details project and cost considerations too. There really is no other mocap book that covers everything this one does.

Our department is working on Motion Capture research. This book helps us to direct a practical approach on not only academic perspective but also entertainment applicaiton.

The historical overview in the first half gave an excellent and entertaining background. It tells the stories of various well known motion capture projects so readers can immediately relate to the real world applications of motion capture and understand what sorts of applications will not work. The technical information was well organized and clearly written. This is a must have for anyone considering motion capture as a part of their project! ---Scott Whitney

At last a no-nonsense book for both users of the technology and those considering using it in their future productions.

The first half deals with the checkered history of motion capture and it's use and misuse to date. Unfortunately most of the stories fall into the negative vein and concentrate on the cases where the use of motion capture turned out to be a costly mistake, but this is all to the benefit of the reader lest he/she should be aligning themselves to make the same mistakes!

There is good practical advice on how to come out of a motion capture session with useable data and some extremely useful math to allow you to transfer it to your character. If you are using off the shelf software some of this may be superfluous, but if you have the opportunity to supplement it with your own proprietary code it could save you months of work. Either way it is genuinely useful in understanding how raw data can be used to drive a computer generated character.

It is hard to find fault with this book. If there is one it is just that the reader is left wanting more of the invaluable 'war-stories' from those who have used the process in the past, and possibly more recently on projects like 'Titanic' and 'The Mummy', if those studios are willing to divulge the detils. Mr Menache warns that facial motion capture is beyond the range of this text but hints that there may be another one to follow to make up for this. It is comforting to see that he himself ran a motion capture studio for many years, and you can be sure that the sum of his experience is inside the pages.

Just buy it BEFORE you start your production!

An excellent overview of the MySQL codebase, philosophy, and the design decisions that have made MySQL what it is today. Even though I have never touched the MySQL source before (it can be a daunting beast for the uninitiated), Sasha's explanations made me comfortable with the 'internals' and finally lifted the 'magic veil' off the engine. 'MySQL internals' has a perfect balance of high-level explanations, and low-level code samples to help you understand the inner workings of the database.

After reading this book you should be comfortable enough to tackle the source, and you'll also have deep understanding of the storage engines and how to configure them, how the query parser works, how the optimizer decides on the execution plan, and much more. This is a must read for any DBA, or a programmer who wants to see a great example of a high-performance, reliable UNIX server.

Sasha knows the mysql code well, and he has done a fantastic job of presenting it. This is an important book for anyone who would like an enhanced understanding of mysql, including DBAs who might need a detailed understanding of locking or replication to. And it's a must-have for anyone working on a storage engine.

Sasha Pachev's UNDERSTANDING MYSQL INTERNALS: DISCOVERING AND IMPROVING A GREAT DATABASE provides clear insights into one of the most popular open source codes on the market. It comes from a former member of the MySQL development team, so offers the author's own insights into the program's creation and use, covering everything from communication protocols between client and server to the parser and optimizer that execute SQL commands, advantages and disadvantages of using threads, and more technical insights.

MySQL is assuming increased importance as an enterprise database and has become the de-facto standard with web hosting companies. A number of books have appeared in recent years, covering various aspects of MySQL. In Understanding MySQL Internals, Sasha Pachev, a MySQL-focused consultant and former member of the MySQL development team, takes us on a tour of how MySQL works and how it is built.

Starting with an overview of MySQL history and architecture, the book quickly moves us through working with the source code to build and run the product in a debugger. Drawing on his deep experience with the software, Mr. Pachev explains the coding conventions used to develop MySQL and why you should use them when modifying the software yourself.

The author delineates the different functional "modules" (a term he coined himself to better explain the database, technically speaking there are no defined modules in MySQL's architecture) of MySQL and how they interrelate. Herein lies the key to how this book teaches the reader the vast intricacy of such a complex piece of software. The author recognizes the subject is huge and the source code changing. What he does in the book is serve as our tour guide, driving us through the various areas and explaining as much relevant information as he reasonably can. He constantly illustrates key pieces of source code and data structures; but perhaps more importantly he makes reference to the actual source files utilized by each functional component of the system, while encouraging us to explore further on our own. His approach is very much "top down".

As he takes us on this tour, the author explains many of the design decisions behind the various MySQL components, often imparting the historical perspective behind them. I appreciate how, throughout the book, the author shares some of his "inside information" about MySQL's development. There is also a section where he examines the code stability of each module and speculates on what the future may hold for each module. The author's writing style is clear and easy to read. I found Understanding MySQL Internals interesting and fun, and surprisingly easy to read for a book covering such a sophisticated piece of software. The author also does a good job explaining the engineering trade-offs of different MySQL configurations. Speaking of configuration, the book shows you how to add your own configuration option to the mysqld daemon.

Chapter 7, the largest chapter in the book, is 41 pages long. It covers the MySQL storage engine interface. This chapter explains how to integrate your own custom storage engine into MySQL and contains the source code for two custom storage engine examples (one for MySQL 4.1, the other for version 5.1). You can download this source code from O'Reilly's web site. Despite this one long chapter, the book is surprising short, only 234 pages.

I believe this book has value outside of MySQL. It does a good job showing how MySQL is essentially a well designed piece of software: a high-performance, reliable Unix server. The book also touches on the multi-platform aspects of MySQL design. Those of you designing other types of server software may benefit from studying how MySQL is constructed.

This book isn't for everyone, but if you are serious about MySQL in particular or database software design in general then this title certainly deserves a look.

This book is basically a manual for Unicode 3.0. It is not a light read but well worth the price and then some just for the glyphs from all of the various scripts that Unicode supports.

At 1040 large (8.5 x 11) pages it is the ultimate guide to unicode. With information on scripts and glyphs I had no idea even existed.

However if you are just getting started with Unicode I would recomend you get Unicode a Primer written by Tony Graham from M&T books. If you understand or feel you are starting to understand Unicode then The Unicode Standard Version 3.0 is the best comprehensive reference on the subject out today.

Consider it an overview of the developing UNICODE standard. As such, it will serve the engineer working on software in English and many other European countries rather well. It will be a good _starting_ _point_ for engineers developing software for other languages.

This book is essential for software engineers, at least for the next ten years or so. All programmers should understand characters, and UNICODE is the best we have for now. Even if you don't need it in your personal library, you need it in your company or school library.

The standard is flawed, as all real standards are, but it is a functioning standard, and it should be sufficient for many purposes for the near future.

The book itself is fairly well laid out, contains an introduction to character handling problems and methods for most of the major languages in use in our present world as well as tables of basic images for all code points. Be aware that these are _only_ basic images. For most internationalization purposes, be prepared for more research. (And please share your results.)

**** Finally, UNICODE is _not_ a 16 bit code. ****

(This is well explained in the book.) It just turned out that there really are over 50,000 Han characters. (Mojikyo records more than 90,000.) UNICODE can be encoded in an eight-bit or 16-bit expanding method or a 32-bit non-expanding method. The expanding methods can be _cleanly_ parsed, frontwards, backwards, and from the middle, which is a significant improvement over previous methods.

Some of the material in the book is available at the UNICODE consortium's site, but the book is easier to read anyway. One complaint I have about the included CD is that the music track gets in the way of reading the transform files on my iBook.

This is not just a reference for computer people, but for anyone interested in alphabets, symbols and character sets.

Central to the book, taking up the larger part of it, are the tables of the characters themselves, printed large with annotations and cross-references. If you enjoy the lure of strange symbols and curious writing systems then browsing these will occupy delightful hours.

For the Latin alphabet alone there are pages of accented letters and extended Latin alphabet characters used in particular languages or places or traditions: Pan-Turkic "oi", African clicks and other African sounds, obsolete letters from Old English and Old Norse, an "ou" digraph used only in Huron/Algonquin languages in Quebec, and many others, particularly those used for phonetic/phonemic transcriptions.

The Greek character set includes archaic letters and additional letters used in Coptic.

Character sets carried over from previous editions with additions and corrections are Cyrillic (with many national characters), Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew, Arabic (again many national and dialect characters), the most common Hindu scripts (Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam), Tibetan, Thai, Lao, Hangul, Bopomofo, Japanese Katakana and Hiragana, capped by the enormous Han character set containing over 27,000 of the most commonly used ideographs in Chinese/Japanese/Korean writing. Then there are the symbols: mathematical/logical (including lots of arrows), technical, geometrical, and pictographic. You'll find astrological/zodiacal signs, chess pieces, I-Ching trigrams, Roman numerals not commonly known, and much more.

Scripts appearing for the first time this release are Syriac, Ethiopic, Unified Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Cherookee, Runes, Ogham, Yi, Mongolian, Sinhala, Thaana, Khmer, Myanmar, complete Braille patterns, and keyboard character sets. And yes, there are public domain/shareware fonts available on the web that support these with their new Unicode values.

There are very good (and not always brief) descriptions of the various scripts and of the special symbol sets. Rounding out the book are some involved, turgid (necessarily so) technical articles on composition, character properties, implementation guidelines, and combining characters, providing rules to use the character properties tables on the CD that accompanies the book. After all, this is the complete official, definitive Unicode standard.

Of course this version, 3.0, is already out-of-date. But updates and corrections are easily available from the official Unicode website where data for 3.1 Beta appears as I write this. My book bulges with interleaved additions and changes. And that's very good. Many standards have died or been superceded because the organizations behind them did not keep up with users' needs or the information was not easily accessible.

Caveats?

The notes on actual uses of the characters could be more extensive, particularly on Latin extended characters. More variants of some glyphs should be shown, as in previous editions, if only in the notations.

Some character names are clumsy or inaccurate (occasionly noted in the book), because of necessity to be compatible with ISO/IEC 10646 and with earlier versions of the Unicode standard. For example, many character names begin with "LEFT" rather than "OPENING" or "RIGHT" rather than "CLOSING" though the same character code is to be used for a mirrored version of the character in right-to-left scripts where "LEFT" and "RIGHT" then become incorrect. And sample this humorous quotation from page 298: "Despite its name, U+0043 SCRIPT CAPITAL LETTER P is neither script nor capital--it is uniquely the Weierstrass elliptic function derived from a calligraphic lowercase p."

Although the Internet and web commerce is still very much an American phenomena, there are many signs that it is about to change. After many years of explosive growth, the curve of new Internet users in the United States is leveling off. Recent articles point to other countries, Brazil in particular, where there could be an explosion of new users. Argentina, India and China also show signs of being poised to enter the only true global market.
To compete in this arena, it is necessary to understand how to display the characters of the "local" language, and for that, you need Unicode. This book is absolutely the best reference on Unicode that currently exists. Often overused, the word definitive is an understatement. Created by the members of the Unicode consortium, it is difficult to conceive of an aspect of Unicode that is not covered in this book.
However, Unicode is more than just characters in spoken languages. With significant sections devoted to mathematical and other commonly used symbols, this is a reference for all who wish to communicate effectively. In every area, there are some references that are essential, and this is one of them.

The Unicode character set is among the most widely used and least known of the international software standards. Java programmers have used it every day for a decade or so, but barely one in ten appear to know anything about it.

The content of ISO standard 10646 (successor to 8-bit ISO 646), goes way beyond just a charcter set. It contains information critical to the correctness of any program that steps outside the English-language world, i.e. every program on the Internet, and many others sooner or later. This is the basis for correct handling of numerals (there's a lot more than 0 to 9), letters, and text. It's also the explanation for some program behaviors that might otherwise baffle a programmer, or at least a programmer with the wit to be baffled.

More than just crucial, the content of this standard is plain fun. Its snippets of information from every major world language give wonderful insight into how people express themselves. It drives home the delighful diversity of human language and experience. It's also a near-bottomless source of stump-your-friends trivia.

I admit, I'll never use every fact in this incredible assembly. I use a lot of the information, though, and I use it as the point of entry into every discussion of internationalization and localization of software.

One reason for the wide acceptance of the Unicode standard is that the Unicode consortium has made it so freely available. There's no point in my discussing in detail what is in this volume when you can peruse PDF files of the entire work on the Unicode website (minus only chapter division graphics).

Browse through the book just like you would in a bookstore or library. Print out parts of it or all of it for free if you want. Well, it is free if you don't count the cost of paper (about 1500 sheets or twice that for simplex printing), cost of a binder (or maybe two binders) and the time you would have to spend punching the holes.

If you are mainly or only interested in particular sections of the standard then printing only those sections may be a reasonable thing to do.

On the other hand the price is *very* reasonable for an 8½" × 11" hardbound book with 1,462 pages. If it's the sort of book you know you want for browsing and for reference then it is likely you will want it in this nicely bound copy.

Like the previously published versions of the Unicode standard, this book is a beautiful book that is useful to those who don't need or want to get into the technical details of character properties and rules for bi-directional display and other necessary rules for displaying the characters. But for the actual use of many characters you will have to consult other lists outside the Unicode book or files, e.g. dictionaries and grammars of various languages or explanations of symbols used in various fields of mathematics.

Language and writing systems are messy and inconsistant and handling them systematically and coherently cannot be made easy. Accordingly the rules and explanations in this standard are by necessity often long and involved and couched in technical language. It can't be avoided that, for example, one must sometimes distinguish carefully between _characters_, _glyphs_, _graphemes_, _grapheme clusters_, _ligatures_ and _digraphs_ and whether one character is a _canonical equivalent_ of another character or sequence of characters or a _compatibility equivalent_ of another character or sequence of characters or just similar to another character or sequence of characters.

The Unicode character set is still a work in progress. Version 4.0 may not even approach the half-way mark in encoding every character that has been used in normal text records by human beings for which a meaning is known. No-one has ever tried to produce a list of characters on this scale before. No-one yet knows how many distinct characters there are.

But 4.0 covers 96,382 characters from *almost* every script currently used for modern languages and from some ancient scripts as well including Ugaritic cuneiform, Cretan Linear B and the ancient Cypriot syllabary. (Sumerian/Akkadian cuneiform is being worked on and Egyptian hieroglyphics will eventually follow.)

Included are a plethora of technical symbol characters including mathematical characters, chess pieces, die faces, characters needed for modern western music notation, characters needed for Byzantine music notation, ornamental dingbats and so much more. All of it is now at the fingertips of every computer user -- that is if fonts that contain the characters are installed.

Finding fonts that display some of these characters is still a problem. :-(

But it would be a worse problem if these characters weren't assigned to a common character set. The past practice of numerous special fonts for various symbols and scripts which disagreed with one another on how the characters were encoded produced a horrible mess.

Large as it is, with 40% more pages than version 3.0, the book doesn't contain the whole standard. Increasingly as the standard has expanded tabular material has been dropped from the printed volumes and replaced with references to data files available on the website or on the CD that comes with the book.

The end of section 3.2 specifies six files found as Annexes on the website and on the CD which "are essential parts of version 4.0" including an explanation of the bidirectional algorithm which appeared in the printed text for earlier releases. And there are many mentions in the printed standard of other files available on the CD or website. A binder containing printouts of this material is necessary if you want a truly complete hardcopy of the entire 4.0 standard.

Unfortunately the 4.0 HTML files are carelessly laid down on the CD with external links pointing to files on the Unicode website and not to the corresponding files on the CD. Graphics are sometimes missing though the only file I think this matters with is StandardizedVariants.html which has a number of variant character images. (The data in this short file should have been in the book).

If you work online you probably won't notice anything wrong but you also are likely not to notice that after clicking on a link you are viewing a file from the Unicode website instead of a file on the CD. That may matter in the future if you need to reference a 4.0 file and don't observe that the file you are actually looking at is from the website and is a "latest version" file that has been updated beyond 4.0. If you are working offline you can avoid this, but it is annoying to have to manually search for the file by name because the link fails.

Also, although the Readme.txt file on the CD mentions "mapping tables" and files with "the extension .UNI", these useful conversion tables which were included on the CD's with previous releases are missing on the 4.0 CD. But they are available on the website.

This is a minor caveat. I suspect most people will use the website in any case rather than the CD.

Anyone dealing with XML or java soon runs into Unicode because this is the standard for representing characters in electronic form in those computer languages. Java, for instance, was designed from its inception to use Unicode. Earlier computer languages like C and C++ can have routines added to handle these, while C# uses XML and hence Unicode.

But chances are, when you deal with Unicode, you only deal with a subset. Often only a small subset at that, unless you are using Chinese/Japanese. Typically you work with ascii and the codes for your spoken language if that is not a Western European language. Very few of us deal with much more than this.

Which illustrates the appeal of the book. The Big Picture. ALL of Unicode. The breadth is stunning. It shows the written form of every major spoken language and many minor ones. Has the pictograms for Chinese [of course]. But also the symbols for Khmer, Canadian Aboriginal, Tamil, Syraic, et cetera, et cetera. Thumbing through this, you may encounter languages that you did not even know existed. It is one thing to say that we live in a multilingual world. But it is another to actually see it expressed comprehensively at the most basic level.

There are two audiences for this book. The first is any computer person who has to deal with issues of internationalisation.

But another audience is every Department of Languages or Cultural Anthropology in a university. If this describes your background, then you should know that you do not need facility in computing to appreciate the significance of this book. You can use it as a standard reference, akin to the Oxford English Dictionary vis-a-vis the English language. Look, ignore the computer stuff in the text. Yes, you can do this. The book groups related languages into common chapters. The explanatory text is lucid and the graphics for the languages lets you easily cross compare. Of course, at a higher level of meaning like sentences, you will need specialised texts in those languages. But to understand a language, you need to start at its letters or pictograms.

Think of this book as an index into all the languages of man.

This book is one that every programmer should have access to. Packed with all of information concerning the latest standards, with explanations, this is the reference that I use whenever I need data regarding Unicode mappings. I recommend it to all of my students and have asked all libraries where I have influence to add it to their collection.
There is also a CD included with the book. It contains a database of the current and all past versions of the Unicode mappings, a series of Unicode technical reports and an installable version of the Unibook Character Browser, a small utility for viewing character charts and properties. Invaluable if you prefer electronic versions of the data.

I originally bought this book back in 1997 and used it to aid my development into writing client server (mostly server) applications running under UNIX.

This book has been heavily used, and many of the server applications I wrote under unix (up until working with windows 3 years ago) using examples from the book on Signals, Pipes and Sockets (while also using Avanced Unix Programming).

Today I dusted off the book as I wanted to write a quick TCP server program using Winsock. I took the example from the book in Sockets and with a couple of very minor tweaks and the stuff to setup winsock I wrote a very simple windows console server application.

OK, some of the commands, like close is closesocket, have changed for windows BUT the majority of code came from the book. This book is still aiding me even today.

This maybe an old book but well worth that cost (and these days its a fraction of the cost I bought it for).

This book has very nice explanations. Sometimes they almost seem too simple, but you can count on it not being over your head. It has lots of illustrations and is fairly easy to read. I think the author takes a complex topic and explains it very, very well. It's also a lot shorter than some of the books by W. Richard Stevens. Both this book and Stevens's "UNIX Network Programming" are too old to include POSIX semaphores. If you get your hands on a book on UNIX distributed programming, look in the index for "sem_init" or posix to see if it has the latest technology. I think everyone who programs in a unix environment should read this book to get a broad introduction to this topic. If you have the time to read 2 books on this topic, I recommend this one 1st to understand the concepts and another book with more examples to get more ideas for coding.

This book has helped me a lot with my assignments in a graduate distributed systems course. Even if you are not familiar with UNIX distributed programming, after reading this book, you will start writing excellent programs for UNIX distributed environment. (You need to be familiar with programming in C)

Chris Brown has written a clear book on the Distributed Progrmming under the UNIX environment. When I started to look into this subject I faced so many barriers cause of lack of clarity and easiness of the other books and materials covering this subject. I have to admit also that I sometimes decided to give the whole thing up. Fortunately, I came across this book and it revived my hope. It is really a good book to start with and deserves of studying. Particular attention should be paid on Sockets. I would however suggest some matterials on the web which could be covered before reading this book. Many examples have worked for me. The way he provides the code examples (which are in C) is also comprehensive and anyone with experience in C should not have problems with understanding them. I would, however, recommend other books (such as Stevens Unix Network Programming and Advanced Programming under the UNIX environment as well as Comer's and Steven's Internetworking with TCP/IP III) to read as a flow-up manuals. One should also test available code (the coplete ones) to have some hands on experience on the subject. Some of the thing did not seem consistent with the author to me.

I've tried many times to find a book that clearly explains Unix in a friendly manner. I should have realized that the Apple ethos was the missing element in all the terse, disjointed treatments I found elsewhere. This book is a dream come true: a book about Unix that is as close to being enjoyable to read as the subject allows. It may not have everything there is to say about unix (I found a few things missing or covered too briefly for my tastes), but the book walks the reader through Unix so gently that I never once felt the blinding frustration that quickly overwhelms me during previous attempts. After this introduction other books (more comprehensive, less humane) can be read as references. Well done!

I have a working understanding of UNIX and am a Mac user. In my experience, this book is ideally targeted for someone like me that wants to improve UNIX skills and prefers to do so on a Mac. Other texts I've consulted seem to jump too fast between really elementary subjects to needs of a system admin. The depth here is still rich, but the reader has time to digest the information before getting to more complex constructs.

For those who are new to Unix, never fear, you won't find a better way to start. This book is very clearly written, easy to understand, and covers more than enough of the shell environment to give the user plenty to work with. Buy it! Get the most out of your Mac.

I loved the first edition of this book, but was thrilled when the updated version was released. (The original book was written before Mac OS X adopted the bash shell by default, so many of the examples were out of whack with later releases of the OS).
I use this as my primary Unix reference at work - where we do not use Macs! It is a comprehensive and easy reference.

I recommend this and O'Reilly's Learning Perl as the two best books (especially if you have a Mac at home) to build your professional Unix chops quickly.

The book concentrates on the various shell environments in UNIX. It's terse explanations keep the size of the book down, while at the same time relating the necessary information to the shell programmer. I refer to the book often when I'm writing shell scripts.

There are sections of the book that deal with some of the most mystical utilities of UNIX, like sed and awk. But I don't feel that I have enough spiritual prowess to learn these utilities. So I haven't ventured into those sections of the book.

Very complete, detailed reference of Unix commands in an easy to find & read format. I use it often

As a Windows user thrust into the UNIX world, I felt lost. With this book the daily mechanics of the UNIX world quickly became easier. Especially well-thumbed sections for: Unix Commands, Bourne and Korn shell, and vi (this section alone justifies the purchase of the book). Very complete, detailed reference of Unix commands in an easy to find & read format. I use it often.

As a PC Windows programmer suddenly thrust into the UNIX world, I felt like I was lost in "a dark and dreary wilderness." With this book at my side, the daily mechanics of the UNIX world quickly became second nature to me. Especially well-thumbed sections so far: Unix Commands, Bourne and Korn shell, vi (this section alone justifies the purchase of the book), and make. By the way, the other book I never put away is a monumental and indispensible desk reference called "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" by W. Richard Stevens.