Books: The Art of UNIX Programming

I just finished reading The Art of UNIX Programming. In short, I liked it a lot.

Here are a few fun quotes:

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming -- Brian Kernighan [p. 14]

Software design and implementation should be a joyous art, a kind of high-level play...To do Unix philosophy right, you need to have (or recover) that attitude. [p. 27]

Microsoft actually admitted publicly that NT security is impossible in March 2003. [p. 69, Unfortunately, the URL he provided no longer works.]

One good test for whether an API is well designed is this one: if you try to write a description of it in purely human language (with no source-code extracts allowed), does it make sense? It is a very good idea to get into the habit of writing informal descriptions of your APIs before you code them. [p. 85, this is a good explanation for why I write docstrings before I write code.]

C++ is anticompact--the language's designer has admitted that he doesn't expect any one programmer to ever understand it all. [p. 89]

One thing Raymond does very well is document things that the rest of us implicitly assume. For instance, he described the various cultures revolving around UNIX. Now I know why I'm so mixed up! I sympathize with several different cultures such as:

• Old-school UNIX hackers
• The Open Source movement
• The Free Software movement
• BSD hackers
• MIT Lisp hackers
• The IETF

My copy of the book is from 2004, and as timeless as this book is, I still wish I could get a "post-modern" opinion on several topics. For instance:

• Linux is so commonplace these days, what should we do now that everyone takes it for granted?
• OS X has really won the hearts of a lot of developers. Is there any hope that the rest of the world will move closer to the Free Software ideal? (Please see my post A Hybrid World of Open and Closed Source Software.)
• I'd love to get his take on Eclipse, TextMate, and modern-day Emacs and Vim.
• I'd also love to get his opinions on Ruby and Rails.

In general, I think it's a fair critique that there weren't enough critiques of Unix. He mostly saved them until the last chapter. I would have enjoyed more critiques throughout. As much as I love Unix, one of my favorite books is The UNIX-HATERS Handbook.

Similarly, all of his discussion on Emacs vs. Vi seemed a bit biased. I know it's hard not to be biased on this topic, but I was a bit frustrated when he called all of Emacs' complexity "optional complexity" and all of Vi's complexity "accidental and ad-hoc complexity." Because of his statements I even gave Emacs another shot. However, as usual, I was reminded that in theory Emacs is my favorite editor, but in practice I'm a Vim user.

Nonetheless, I do have high praise for this book. When I was totally burnt out and couldn't code for two months, I found this book refreshing and relaxing. I owe Raymond my thanks :)