The C Programming Language (2nd Edition)

Advanced Programming in the UNIX(R) Environment (2nd Edition) (Addison-Wesley Professional Computing Series)

Design of the UNIX Operating System (Prentice Hall Software Series)

Unix

The UNIX Programming Environment

Format: Paperback
Author: Brian W. Kernighan
ReleaseDate: March, 1984
Publisher: Prentice Hall
Rating:

Great book on the foundations of the UNIX environment
Although there are better books on the specific flavors of UNIX available today, no other book does as good a job of explaining the philosophy of generic UNIX and its intrinsic relationship to the C programming language. In spite of its advanced age, this book is still relevant and explains many topics better than much newer books on the various flavors of UNIX. The book starts out talking about invoking common commands from the command line, the UNIX file system, and then moves on to "filtering"- which in this context means feeding the output of one command into the input of another command until you obtain the output you desire. Next shell programming is introduced along with sed and awk, which are the oldest of the UNIX scripting languages. Finally, we exhaust what can be done with sed, awk, and scripts consisting of UNIX commands already in existence. So, the authors show us how to "roll our own" UNIX commands by writing C programs and invoking their executable versions just like a UNIX command would be invoked. This part of the book is not meant to be a tutorial on the C programming language, so the reader should already know C or have another source for learning it. As an addendum to the section on C programming and UNIX, the authors illustrate how to use the UNIX system calls to build a richer set of commands. These system calls are interfaces to the UNIX OS kernel and provide a means for the programmer/user to access I/O, create and access files and directories, process errors, manage and create processes, and handle signals - which are the UNIX version of interrupts and exceptions. The book closes with a discussion of yacc and lex and illustrates how they can be used to build a calculator for use in the UNIX environment.
This is a very "hands on" kind of book, so you should have access to a UNIX based system that has a C compiler handy so that you can type in the commands and do the exercises as you read along in the book. If you are a beginner to the world of UNIX, regardless of the flavor that you are ultimately interested in using, this is a great book to get your feet wet and to understand the power of this operating system. .

The bible of Unix
It is very practical, and it gives you a good understanding of the philosophy of the Unix system and how to use it. This book is the best book on programming on Unix.

Unix is a programmers environment. Once you understand the foundation it is a very productive environment. It will show you the tools, the philosophy behind the tools, and how to be productive in the Unix environment. People who hate Unix haven't read this book or aren't programmers.

A Must Have for Unix/Linux programmers
If you master everything in this book along with the "C Programming Language" and "Advanced UNIX Programming", you will truly be a UNIX programmer. This is one of the best programming books I have.