Library · Tag

Unix

An annotated collection of 5 books & papers on unix, spanning 1978 to 2003. Featuring works by M. Douglas McIlroy, Brian W. Kernighan & Rob Pike, Mike Gancarz and 1 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.

UNIX Time-Sharing System: Foreword

M. Douglas McIlroy, 1978 · The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 57, No. 6

McIlroy's foreword to the Bell System Technical Journal's special issue on Unix contains the most quoted formulation of the Unix philosophy: "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work togeth…

The UNIX Programming Environment

Brian W. Kernighan & Rob Pike, 1984 · Prentice Hall

The Unix philosophy in one volume. Kernighan and Pike teach a way of thinking, not a tool: build small programs that do one thing well, and combine them through plain text. The whole discipline of modular systems — APIs,…

The UNIX Philosophy

Mike Gancarz, 1995 · Digital Press (2nd edition as Linux and the Unix Philosophy, 2003)

Gancarz codifies the Unix philosophy into nine tenets — small is beautiful, make each program do one thing well, build a prototype as soon as possible, choose portability over efficiency, among others. Where Kernighan an…

The Practice of Programming

Brian W. Kernighan & Rob Pike, 1999 · Addison-Wesley

Kernighan and Pike distil four decades of craft into a small book about what it actually means to program well: not writing clever code but writing code another person can read, debug and keep alive. Each chapter — style…

The Art of UNIX Programming

Eric S. Raymond, 2003 · Addison-Wesley

Raymond gathers and articulates the design principles that made Unix what it is — modularity, clarity, composition, transparency — and argues they are not Unix trivia but a general ethics of engineering. Read it alongsid…