The Art of UNIX Programming

I. CONTEXT. 1. Philosophy. Culture? What culture? The durability of Unix. The case against learning Unix culture. What Unix gets wrong. What Unix gets right. Basics of the Unix philosophy. The Unix philosophy in one lesson. Applying the Unix philosophy. Attitude matters too. 2. History. Origins and history of Unix, 1969-1995. Origins and history of the hackers, 1961-1995. The open-source movement: 1998 and onward. The lessons of Unix history. 3. Contrasts. The elements of operating-system style. Operating-system comparisons. What goes around, comes around. II. DESIGN. 4. Modularity. Encapsulation and optimal module size. Compactness and orthogonality. Libraries. Unix and object-oriented languages. Coding for modularity. 5. Textuality. The Importance of Being Textual. Data file metaformats. Application protocol design. Application protocol metaformats. 6. Transparency. Some case studies. Designing for transparency and discoverability. Designing for maintainability. 7. Multiprogramming. Separating complexity control from performance tuning. Taxonomy of Unix IPC methods. Problems and methods to avoid. Process partitioning at the design level. 8. Minilanguages. Taxonomy of languages. Applying minilanguages. Designing minilanguages. 9. Transformation. Data-driven programming. Ad-hoc code generation. 10. Configuration. What should be configurable? Where configurations live. Run-control files. Environment variables. Command-line options. How to choose among configuration-setting methods. On breaking these rules. 11. Interfaces. Applying the Rule of Least Surprise. History of interface design on Unix. Evaluating interface designs. Tradeoffs between CLI and visual interfaces. Transparency, expressiveness, and configurability. Unix interface design patterns. Applying Unix interface-design patterns. The Web browser as universal front end. Silence is golden. 12. Optimization. Don't just do something, stand there! Measure before optimizing. Non-locality considered harmful.

ERIC S. RAYMOND has been a Unix developer since 1982. Known as the resident anthropologist and roving ambassador of the open-source community, he wrote the movement's manifesto in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and is the editor of The New Hacker's Dictionary.