I bought this book years ago, and the title is misleading. It is not so much a programming, as ESR's personal interpretation of UNIX culture and values.
If you like ESR, you will probably love it. If not, it will read like unstructured drivel.
Maybe, I am too negative. But if you are a non-UNIX programmer, and have to work on a UNIX project, there are far better books available. (E.g. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen Rago)
To be fair, the subject of the title is "Art" and the object is "Programming". This is about the art and care that developers should put into the Unix community and the tools they build. In a way, it's an intro to the mindset and philosophy of openness in technology.
> Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen Rago
Stevens was a great writer, but his books covered precisely all that was and is wrong with 'modern' Unix systems, they could be considered a summary of what is the opposite to the Unix philosophy.
To truly understand the Unix way, Pike and Kernighan's The Unix Programming Environment is by far the best choice.
Does anyone else find ESR's writings to be haughty and a bit sophomoric? He may be brilliant, but every time I pick up this book I get turned off almost immediately.
Besides using wget to rip the entire thing is there a tar.gz or zip handy with everything in it? Flying soon and would like some offline reading material...
Just make sure that you don't get one that is too small - I borrowed an iRex iLiad [1] from the library at the university, and I found that the 8.1-inch (21 cm) display meant constant "scrolling" with the touch-pen, which was rather annoying due to the high response-time of the system.
The only book that I finished reading on it, was Mercurial: The Definitive Guide by Bryan O'Sullivan [2]. The reason that I could read this book, was that it was released for free online by the author with all source files so that I could compile it in a smaller page-format with bigger fonts (the figures did not scale automatically, but IMHO, they weren't crucial to understanding the content of the book).
This contains some good bits, but "The Unix Programming Environment" by Rob Pike and Brian Kernighan is a much more eloquent and concise explanation of the essence of the Unix philosophy.
If you like ESR, you will probably love it. If not, it will read like unstructured drivel.
Maybe, I am too negative. But if you are a non-UNIX programmer, and have to work on a UNIX project, there are far better books available. (E.g. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, by W. Richard Stevens and Stephen Rago)