Linux Application Development

Johnson and Troan is a great book for Linux programmers. It covers in good detail a wide range of topics in system programming, including process management, file and directory structures, linux development tools, signals, and terminal programming. Network programming is lightly covered, but network programming is a very large topic and is covered well in other books. Threads are also not covered, but again, threaded programming is a complex topic and is covered elsewhere. Johnson and Troan contains a long running example program, ladsh, which is a shell. This is a great example because developing a shell requires a high degree of interaction with the kernel and file system. The book does a great job of accurately covering the function prototypes for the core system library, including the many flags passed as parameters. Overall this is an excellent book, and it is one of the most frequently used programming texts on by shelf. I highly recommend it.

This should be one of the best Linux & UNIX programming books available in the market. It provided & covers most Linux's system calls in such detailed, although not as good as "Advanced Programming in UNIX Environment", which does a "perfect (or almost)" job (with almost twice the size of this book, though). About programming the X Windows, I think it is OK to exclude the topics about X from this book. Since this book is about programming in Linux environment, not making the X application. (Like Stroustrup's "The C++ Programming Language" didn't even mention the MFC..) Finally, I, personally, think that "This is the book that Linux & UNIX programmers should have consider about having it".

Most Linux books on market now are aiming users or beginning programers, but this is the book for real Linux programmers. You can find many things you can not in other Linux books.

This book was written with an easy to read style, and the content is excellent. I'll forgive them for not including anything related to X11 programming, but they mention that their reason was that X Windows programming is not specific to Linux, and this is a *LINUX* programming book. Well fine, but I still have to find a book on X Programming. Imagine a book on Windows NT Programming that skipped all the GUI parts. I guess the Unix crowd is 10 years behind the NT crowd in acceptance of GUIs.Reading this book made many of the arcane details of Unix architecture make sense, finally. I have read many Linux books, and most are long on technical drivel and short on enlightenment. If you are enlightened, you don't need the drivel, because the technical details are easy to absorbe and remember once they make sense. This book excels at making sense of Linux. It should have been called "Making Sense of Linux Application Development", because that's what it is. You could probably get a lot out of it, even if you don't know C very well or you aren't all that interested in C programming in Linux. The explanations are clearly presented, and the chapters stand alone, and are a great reference material, as well as interesting general reading for those interested in the internals of Linux.This book explains a lot of services that the kernel provides, especially in regards to the Linux process model and unix filesystems, as well as interprocess communications (Unix domain sockets) and network programming (TCP/IP sockets). CAVEAT: This shouldn't be your *first* Linux book. There's a lot of material besides the writing of the code that you need to cover first. To get you comfy in the classic Unix shell environment read Hands On Unix, by Mark Sobell.