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Reviewer: Don Goelman

I found this book enjoyable, but it is difficult to classify its purpose. According to the author, communities for whom it's intended include my own: Unix programmers with some experience who are educating novices, as well as other groups from various backgrounds who would profit from learning Unix history, philosophy, and style. The place of the book is somewhere in the convex hull of the related references Raymond cites [1,2,3,4]. Note their wide range! I would say Zen flesh, zen bones [1], while different from this book, is maybe its nearest neighbor in the set. The book is a mix of history, culture, philosophy, and technical material. There are appropriately positive descriptions and support for open source software and portability. There is, by design, no detailed code (in stark contrast with The Unix programming environment [2] and with The art of computer programming [3], which influenced the name of the present book), but there are meta-level descriptions of important programs and links to code. The top two levels of the table of contents aren't terribly helpful in reflecting the material that they contain. There are four main units: "Context," "Design," "Implementation," and "Community." The chapters in the "Context" unit are "Philosophy," "History," and "Contrasts." The first four chapters in "Design," for example, are "Modularity," "Textuality," "Transparency," and "Multiprogramming." Fortunately, the table goes down another couple of levels, providing more assistance to the reader regarding what she or he should expect. For example, Emacs can be found as a topic by browsing those lower levels of the table. In fact, it appears in some form in several different chapters. The difficulty in finding specific topics is exacerbated by the lack of an index. Admittedly, I am reviewing a prepublication draft of the book, but the presence of some appendices (including a useful Glossary of Abbreviations) leads me to conclude that no index is planned. The historical accounts are interesting, the illustrations of the ongoing influence of Unix (even in the Windows generation) are impressive, the pitch for open source is appropriate, and some of the plain fun of Unix is captured. Further, there are several entertaining quotations. I hope that some of the typos will be spotted and fixed, and the bibliographic entries formatted consistently by publication time. Besides the lack of an index, some other shortcomings, in my opinion, are the absence of a timeline in the otherwise good historical account, and the book's size. Exceeding 500 pages may not be excessive these days, but The Unix programming environment [2], which Raymond correctly characterizes as "a classic [that] shows its age a bit," managed to provide nontrivial code, pose challenging and instructive exercises, and convey the aesthetic beauty of the Unix environment, all in 357 pages. Online Computing Reviews Service

Reviewer: Diomidis Spinellis

Raymond is often described as the unofficial spokesperson of the Open Source community. In his new book, he successfully tackles a much grander task: that of articulating and explaining the guiding design, implementation, and social principles behind the success, adaptability, and durability of the Unix operating system. Although the word programming appears in the book's title, Raymond covers a wider and deeper ground. The first part of the book explains the Unix development context by outlining the most important positive features of Unix, and the 17 guiding elements of the Unix philosophy. These elements prescribe the structure of systems following the Unix way (modularity, composition, separation, diversity, and extensibility), their behavior (clarity, simplicity, parsimony, silence, transparency, robustness, repair, and least surprise), and the approach to building them (economy, generation, representation, and distrust for optimization). The first part ends with two chapters that provide a historical overview of Unix, and an instructive comparison of Unix with other systems. In the book's next two parts, "Design" and "Implementation," the author manages to distill the accumulated wisdom of programming following the Unix philosophy into concrete principles, such as the use of text-based protocols, the utilization of domain-specific minilanguages, the structure of user interfaces, the choice of programming languages, and the use of tools. Each principle is illustrated by numerous case studies (a dozen, in the case of minilanguages), and is accompanied by prescriptive guidelines for applying the principle in practice. Importantly, the author is never shy in identifying a particular technology as a dead end, advising us to steer away from it. Many chapters can be read as mini surveys and concise tutorials for the techniques they discuss. Raymond uses the idea of open-source software as a unifying principle behind this book. He argues that Unix began its history as an effectively open-source system (AT&T, being restrained from selling it, distributed Unix along with its source code to universities and research institutes for only a nominal fee). He also argues that Unix's current popularity and versatility stem, again, from open source systems such as GNU/Linux and FreeBSD. The book's last part, "Community," explores this aspect in depth, by examining the elements around which the Unix community is built. Here, Raymond discusses portability (providing an excellent roadmap of the, typically obtuse and contradicting, Unix-related standardization efforts), documentation (giving solid advice for choosing and using the appropriate documentation format), and open source (offering guidelines for contributing, developing, and distributing open source software). A final chapter, "Futures: Dangers and Opportunities," discusses the problems facing Unix, with respect to its design, environment, and culture, presenting the challenges in the road ahead. As many readers already know by experience, Raymond's writing is fluid, free from unnecessary technical jargon, and remarkably perceptive. All these qualities make this book a joy to read, and a valuable contribution to the Unix community. Online Computing Reviews Service