by M. Tim Jones
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Product Description
GNU/Linux is the Swiss army knife of operating systems. You’ll find it in the smallest devices (such as an Apple iPod) to the largest most powerful supercomputers (like IBM’s Blue Gene). You’ll also find GNU/Linux running on the most diverse architectures, from the older x86 processors to the latest cell processor that powers the PlayStation 3 console. GNU/Linux Application Programming, Second Edition gets you up and running developing applications on the GNU/Linux operating system, whether you’re interested in creating applications for an iPod or a Blue Gene. This completely updated edition covers all the necessary tools and techniques with many examples illustrating the use of GNU/Linux APIs. Split into fi ve distinct parts, the book covers GNU tools, topics in application development, shells and scripting, debugging and hardening, and introductory topics, including the fundamentals of virtualization. See why thousands of programmers have chosen GNU/Linux Application Programming to teach them how to develop applications on the GNU/Linux operating system!
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Wonderful book, 2008-04-25
This book is perfect for anyone who needs to write application software for GNU/Linux. It describes all those miscellaneous features for programming that are above the kernel but below the level of integrated development environments. It describes makefiles, gcc, debugging, object file analysis, sockets, pthreads, performance analysis and much more. The latest edition also has an excellent overview of virtualization.
The author doesn't go into detail on any one subject, and that is what makes the book so good. I can find details in various online sources. This book is perfect for someone who had normal training in C/C++ and now needs to understand how to develop on a GNU/Linux system.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
 Lazy authoring and dodgy code, 2007-10-21
Bought this book as it had so many good reviews on Amazon.com. I really should have paid more attention to the one review that said "Disappointing" (Paul Floyd of Grenoble, France).
I haven't yet read the bits about history, tools or shell scripting. What I have read is the section covering application development. This skims through areas such as sockets, threading, semaphores, mutexes, message queues, memory-mapped files etc. All useful areas, but this book does little more than tell you what the man pages tell you. That's where the first bit of lazy authoring comes in. The second bit of lazy authoring is the complete absence of an explanation of how to use these areas together, or an example of using them together. Given the list of topics, an example would have been useful that starts a worker thread to handle a TCP connection, that thread waiting on file descriptors and a timeout using select or poll, using mutexes to protect data, a message queue to communicate between the main thread and the worker thread, and possibly a memory-mapped file to create a circular log of the last N actions performed. Unfortunately the author didn't attempt that. But we should possibly consider ourselves lucky that he didn't, as the example code he does provide contains some major failings, most notably putting code inside assertions that is required even in optimised release builds. When this code gets compiled out in an optimised release build the examples fail. Obvious to anyone that knows about assertions, but not necessarily to everyone reading the book.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
 Disappointing code examples, 2007-09-03
Looks like I'm going to break the mould of giving five star reviews to this book.
Part I is a brief overview of the history and motivation behind Linux. No bones there.
Part II covers compiler and related tools. I learnt a few things from these chapters (I wasn't familiar with either autotools or gcov).
Part III covers application development. The emphasis is mainly on IPC. There are some grim errors in the code. In particular, I winced when I saw the use of asserts that contained statements performing actions with (necessary!) side-effects. Compiled in optimized mode in most environments, this code will crash. For this section, Stevens/Rago APUE or Rochkind AUP serve much better.
Part IV, shell scripts and tools is OK, as is part V, debug/test.
I'm not sure why there's a CD included. It contains the source code (of little value, easily downloaded) and all of the diagrams used in the book. I can't imagine that they will ever come in handy.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Great reference if you program for the Linux platform, 2007-07-01
This book covers a wide breadth of what you need to get started with Linux programming. The writing is very good and readable.
The examples though simple, are very clear and concise, and makes you understand at a fundamental level what elements of Linux you need to know.
The ones I liked in particular were:
- IPC (interprocess communication)
- Linux process model, and pThreads
- shell scripting, awk, sed
- bison, flex
- tools like GDB (debugger), gprof (performance), gcov (code coverage)
- sockets programming
Note that this book does not go very deep into these topics, but if you need a refresher on the basics, or you don't know a particular area of linux, this book is highly recommended.
Most of the examples are in C, as expected, (being Linux) except for a very short example in Ruby with Sockets programing.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
great book to get you going, 2007-06-09
I've been programming for a good while but I am relatively new to Linux. Sure I've flirted with it a little in the past but I've mostly been down in the worlds of Nulceus, vxworks, and threadx.
I found myself needing to come up to speed fast on a lot of little things - multi threading, communications, piping and build processes. This book covers it all in good enough detail to get you on your feet fast. The sections on signals was especially helpful as was the nice overview of gdb which while not the debugger type I'm used to - really proved to me how useful that old program still is (and since I'm stuck with the command line version of it - how to really make that version sing).
As a quick reference/introduction this book can't be beat. Highly recommended
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