''The Art of Unix Programming'' by

Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the ...

is a book about the history and culture of

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

programming from its earliest days in 1969 to 2003 when it was published, covering both genetic derivations such as

BSD The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berk ...

and conceptual ones such as

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. The author utilizes a comparative approach to explaining Unix by contrasting it to other

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

s including desktop-oriented ones such as

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

to ones with research roots such as

EROS In Greek mythology, Eros (, ; grc, Ἔρως, Érōs, Love, Desire) is the Greek god of love and sex. His Roman counterpart was Cupid ("desire").''Larousse Desk Reference Encyclopedia'', The Book People, Haydock, 1995, p. 215. In the earli ...

and

Plan 9 from Bell Labs Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has be ...

. The book was published by Addison-Wesley, September 17, 2003, and is also available online, under a

Creative Commons Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has release ...

license with additional clauses.

Contributors

The book contains many contributions, quotations and comments from UNIX gurus past and present. These include: *

Ken Arnold Kenneth Cutts Richard Cabot Arnold (born 1958) is an American computer programmer well known as one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling video game '' Rogue'', for his contributions to the original Berkeley (BSD) distribution of Uni ...

(author of

curses A curse (also called an imprecation, malediction, execration, malison, anathema, or commination) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, ...

and co-author of '' Rogue'') *

Steve Bellovin Steven M. Bellovin is a researcher on computer networking and security. He has been a professor in the Computer Science department at Columbia University since 2005. Previously, Bellovin was a Fellow at AT&T Labs Research in Florham Park, New Jer ...

Stuart Feldman Stuart Feldman is a computer scientist. He is best known as the creator of the computer software program ''make''. He was also an author of the first Fortran 77 compiler, was part of the original group at Bell Labs that created the Unix operat ...

Jim Gettys Jim Gettys (born 15 October 1953) is an American computer programmer. He was involved in multiple computer related projects. Activity Gettys worked at DEC's Cambridge Research Laboratory. Until January 2009, he was the Vice President of Sof ...

Stephen C. Johnson Stephen Curtis Johnson (b. 1944; known as Steve Johnson) is a computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs and Old AT&T, AT&T for nearly 20 years. He is best known for Yacc, Lint (software), Lint, spell (Unix), spell, and the Portable C Compiler, w ...

Brian Kernighan Brian Wilson Kernighan (; born 1942) is a Canadian computer scientist. He worked at Bell Labs and contributed to the development of Unix alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan's name became widely known through co-au ...

* David Korn *

Mike Lesk Michael E. Lesk (born 1945) is an American computer scientist. Biography In the 1960s, Michael Lesk worked for the SMART Information Retrieval System project, wrote much of its retrieval code and did many of the retrieval experiments, as well as ...

Doug McIlroy Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed se ...

Marshall Kirk McKusick Marshall Kirk McKusick (born January 19, 1954) is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD UNIX, from the 1980s to FreeBSD in the present day. He was president of the USENIX Association from 1990 to 1992 and again from 2002 ...

Keith Packard Keith Packard (born April 16, 1963) is a software developer, best known for his work on the X Window System. Packard is responsible for many X extensions and technical papers on X. He has been heavily involved in the development of X since the l ...

Henry Spencer Henry Spencer (born 1955) is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also wrote ''The Ten Commandments for C ...

Ken Thompson Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programmi ...

Contributors

See also