Product Reviews

ISBN 0131429647

Pages 448

I often find myself programming with Linux in mind these days, so any book that promises to cover this area is of interest. Arnold Robbins' book is something of an oddball, though. It decides to focus on the very fundamentals and reading it feels like you've entered a time warp. All the programs are written in C and the main topic of the book is using the basic Linux API calls. It covers topics such as memory management,

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file I/O, processes, signals and so on. It reads very much like a book on classic Unix programming from the days long before GUI interfaces and graphics. It's all very readable and the examples are clear and understandable. UNIX 7 source code is used for illustration and the entire book is reminiscent of old-fashioned Linux, UNIX or even MS-DOS programming.

Whether or not there is any point in learning such basic API calls depends on your goals. If you want to get inside Linux and write ground-breaking programs, you need to work at this level, tedious though it is. But if you want to write applications, you can probably skip this material and use the higher-level language approach of Java, Kylix or Mono. Even if you were to master everything in this book you would have taken only a very small first step because you would still have to find out about the Linux GUI interfaces, such as Gnome, to produce anything really useful.

A classic or old-fashioned approach to Linux programming, depending on your point of view.