Advanced Linux Programming – book with free PDF (2001)

In my opinion these are best two books on the subject. Stevens' book is classic and have been updated quite recently (3rd edition came out 3 years ago), LPI is very extensive and have some specific Linux info not present in Stevens' book and is clearly influenced by Stevens book.

How strongly do you recommend these books? Unfortunately I'm a college student without much cash to toss around, but I can scrape together enough for a book if it'll make me a better programmer in the long run.

LPI is the way to go.

I just started doing kernel devlopment professionally, and ironically the content of LPI is relatively higher level.

Glad I read it before starting though.

Well I don't think it is so much better, I is very usefull but it seems to my more like a manual than a book

Some of the subjects it treats are low-level enough (and of Unix-ish heritage) that their treatment is probably not irrelevant today. The performance considerations of threads and processes are probably out of date, but their API (sections 3 and 4) is largely still the same. Same for shared memory and other IPC mechanisms described in section 5. The API re. section 7 still applies -- /proc has expanded considerably since 2001, but it's still used in the same manner. Chapter 8 is probably more out of date than others, but you can still follow it. Stuff in 9 is probably not used much anymore, an #10, while adequate, would probably be considered incomplete today.

I'd say it's still useful to someone who comes to Linux from other platforms, or to people who are already using Linux but aren't familiar with systems programming under it.

Edit: although, as someone else pointed out, APUE is probably a better choice (and was a better choice back in 2001, too).

If you're looking for a better maintained book, I'd recommend "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment" by W. Richard Stevens, revised by Stephen A. Rago. It's not a free PDF however, but well worth the money.

With the exception of systemd versus init, the big ideas are pretty much unchanged. Details around hardware and distribution features should be kept in historical perspective and application context, by which I mean that a 2001 64 megabytes of RAM desktop might be today's embedded system and most people won't have to configure networking over two dial up modems.

For me, the critical issue with technical books is readability and accessibility. If it's in front of me and I enjoy reading it because I'm learning something, that's often good enough. If I were already an expert Linux programmer, then I might have different criteria. I know I ain't.

This book is dated - there was the kernel 2.4 and a lot of system calls were changed or removed - but I think it is one of the best book available on GNU/Linux system programming.

I love "UNIX Systems Programming: Communication, Concurrency and Threads", it is simply great.

Raymond's The Art of Unix Programming is a good resource for understanding the design philosophy of Unix...and by extension Linux. It explains much of the context and history behind why things are done the way they are done and what good nix programs do to be good nix programs.

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/

It is somewhat helpful, but the examples for shared memory and mmap ignore concurrency issues and refer you to a generic, non-language specific WikiPedia page for guidance.

The first line in the table on http://advancedlinuxprogramming.com/alp-folder/ is a link to the PDF of the full book.

http://advancedlinuxprogramming.com/alp-folder/advanced-linu...

(The size in the table is incorrect. It's 3866012 bytes, not 1273361. The md5sum is correct.)

Using the higher performance Linux specific interfaces like epoll isn't doing it wrong, it is getting the most out of your platform. Perhaps it is doing it wrong to use it directly instead of a library in application code, but someone still has to know enough to write the library.

This sort of comment could be based on real knowledge, but it's hard to tell because you just gave us a conclusion rather than showing us how you came to it. A better comment would add information: give an example or two, tell a story, or say what's behind your thinking somehow.

Where can I find a "UNIX" distribution to try? :-)

Linux are in every android cell phones, PI, pc, etc.