This book is a fantastic starting point in life. Some how our public schools over look teaching the fundamental skills presented in this book. We learn how to play with toys on simple computers and never really learn what we are doing.

The real strength of this book is in the definitions. We get to see the purpose and flexibility of system calls and functions. Not just use them but understand them. UNIX functions as job control or signals are explained in detail. Let’s take just one item “waitpid”:

The waitpid function provides three features that aren’t provided by the wait function.

You will have to red the book to find out what they are. However there are examples also. Now for people with real systems like AIX all you have to do is ad a “k” to the front of the call and you have the AIX kernel function call “kwaitpid”; voila you now have an understanding that can not be found clearly in a Red Book.

It does help some to have a preunderstanding of the system do you can use the book to fill in the education holes missed when necessary.

The index is worth its weight in gold as you can find functions headers and concepts all in alphabetical order. My favorite is the definitions.

As much as I am a fan of the internet it also pays to carry the information in the form of a book. And all this book has to do is save a couple of hours and it has paid for its self.