Book excerpts:

The Art of Unix Programming is mainly about expertise. It is going to try to teach you the things about Unix development that Unix experts know, but aren't aware that they know. It is therefore less about technicalia and more about shared culture than most Unix books ? both explicit and implicit culture, both conscious and unconscious traditions. It is not a 'how-to' book, it is a 'why-to' book.

The why-to has great practical importance, because far too much software is poorly designed. Much of it suffers from bloat, is exceedingly hard to maintain, and is too difficult to port to new platforms or extend in ways the original programmers didn't anticipate. These problems are symptoms of bad design. Readers of this book will learn something of what Unix has to teach about good design.

Because this book is aimed at transmitting culture, it includes much more in the way of history and folklore and asides than is normal for a technical book. So this book is neither a C tutorial, nor a guide to the Unix commands and API. It is not a reference for sed or yacc or Perl or Python. It's not a network programming primer, nor an exhaustive guide to the mysteries of X. It's not a tour of Unix's internals and architecture, either. Other books cover these specifics better, and this book points you at them as appropriate.

Reviews:

Amazon.com

:) "I have been using Unix (and its variants) for a decade and have quite some knowledge about "how-to", but probably like most other Unix programmers, have never systematically thought about the underlying "why". This book is going to tell you both in details."

:) "The advice is so simple, obvious, and logical that you will find yourself wondering why you didn't think of these things in the first place."

:( "Raymond is not quite the UNIX expert he thinks he is. In places, Raymond's tone encourages one to throw the book at the nearest wall and go out just to get some fresh air; He is condescending, hectoring, lecturing, and sometimes just misleading."

RootPrompt.org

:) "The Art of Unix Programming is a great book for a new user who wants to learn more about Unix. It will teach them more about why Unix is the way it is and why that is a very good thing than any other book I have seen."

UnixReview.com

:) "I like Eric Raymond's writing style: clarity, respect for and invitation to learning, respect for history without obsequiousness, etc."