Life With UNIX

This is essential reading for the UNIX beginner as well as the expert.

With an irreverent and easy-to-read style, authors Don Libes and Sandy Ressler examine all of UNIX's advantages as well as its shortcomings — exploring everything that manuals and introductory texts neglect.

• Section 1: Past, Present, Future
• Chapter 1: UNIX History
1. Before the Beginning
2. In the Beginning
3. Philosophy
4. 1979 — Seventh Edition
5. Politics — Part I
6. Politics — Part II
7. UNIX Cloning
8. The UNIX Trademark
9. Recent History: 980-1986
10. Politics — Part III
11. Is UNIX Just History?
12. Who's Who
• Chapter 2: UNIX Present
1. UNIX — A Perfunctory Definition
2. The UNIX Philosophy
3. The User Interface
4. UNIX, the Operating System
5. Versions
6. Portability — Part I
7. Portability — Part II
8. UNIX Licensing
9. Buying UNIX
1. Making the Decision
2. The Mechanics
10. The Dominant UNIX Sellers
11. The Dominant UNIX Hardware and Porters
12. The Dominant UNIX Clones
13. The Dominant UNIX Customers
14. The Dominant UNIX Competitors
• Chapter 3: UNIX Future
1. Standards
1. C Standards
2. UNIX Standards
2. Merging System C with BSD with XENIX
3. Mach
4. Berkeley 4.3 and BRL
5. Changing Technologies
6. User-Friendly UNIX — The Macintosh/Smalltalk Influence
7. C++
8. The Networking Influence
9. Portables and Laptops
10. UNIX: The Standard Operating System
11. A Foundation for Innovation
• Section 2: UNIX Information
• Chapter 4: Printed Information
1. The UNIX Manuals
1. A Little History
2. Obtaining Manuals
3. Organization of the Manuals
4. What?!? No Manual On the Kernel?
2. Sources Are The Ultimate
3. UNIX and C Bookstores and Publishers
4. Reference Cards
5. Books
6. Periodicals
• Chapter 5: Nonprinted Information
1. Conferences
1. Conference Freebies and Other Trash
2. Workshops
3. Courses
4. User Groups
• Section 3: Inside UNIX
• Chapter 6: The User's Environment
1. Beachbombing for Shells
2. Shell Basics
1. I/O Redirection
2. Pipes
3. Shell Scripts
4. Aliases
5. Environment Variables
6. Process Control
3. File Structure and Names
4. A Tool is a Command is a Filter is a …
1. File Manipulation Commands
2. Data Manipulation Commands
3. Programming Commands
4. Miscellaneous Commands
5. Putting It All Together
• Chapter 7: The Programmer's Environment
1. System Concepts
1. I/O
1. Ordinary Files and Directories
2. Devices
3. Device Drivers
4. Basic I/O System Calls
5. Standard I/O
6. Some More Device Drivers
2. Processes
3. Signals
2. C and Other Languages
1. C and UNIX: A Symbiotic Relationship
2. Libraries
3. C Preprocessor
3. Support Tools
1. Debuggers
2. Make
3. Version Control
4. Yacc and Lex
5. Profiling
6. Lint
7. Curses
8. Editors
4. Other Tools
• Chapter 8: The Administrator's Environment
1. Managing the System
1. Initial Configuration
2. Booting
3. Halting
4. Debugging after a Crash
2. Managing Disks
1. Mounting and Unmounting the File System
2. Maintaining File System Integrity
3. Backups
4. Disk Quotas
5. Symbolic Links
6. Find, Xargs
3. Managing Tapes
4. Managing Terminals and Serial Lines
1. Init and Getty
2. Termcap and Terminfo
3. Setting Terminal Options — stty
5. Managing Users
1. User Accounts
2. Group Accounts
3. Communication
4. Uucp
6. Managing System Activity
1. Miscellaneous Files
2. Daemons and Other Processes
7. Security & Insecurity
1. File Permissions
2. Superuser a.k.a. Root
3. Setuid
4. Security in a Distributed Environment
• Section 4: Outside UNIX
• Chapter 9: UNIX Underground
1. Usenet
1. How to Get on Usenet
1. Commercial Usenet and Public-access UNIX Systems
1. Acessing Other Networks
1. Usenet History
1. April Fools Day on Usenet
1. The Future of Usenet
2. Public-domain or Otherwise Free Software
1. Archives
2. Usenet Source Newsgroups
3. User Group Software
4. GNU and the Free Software Foundation
5. MINIX
3. Public-domain Hardware
4. Games
5. Obfuscated C
• Chapter 10: UNIX Services
1. Benchmarking
2. Consulting
3. Emergency!
4. Jobs
1. Looking For New Employees
2. Looking For New Jobs
5. Mailing Lists
6. Porting, Integration and Installation
1. Porting
2. Integration and Installation
7. Security
8. Validation
9. Timesharing
10. typesetting and Publishing
• Chapter 11: UNIX Applications
1. Vertical Software
2. Accounting and Finance
3. Artificial Intelligence
4. CAD, CAE, CAM
5. Character Graphics, Form and Menu Systems
6. Communications
7. Databases and Database Management Systems
8. Desktop Publishing
9. Editors
10. Fourth Generation Languages
11. Graphics
12. Mail, Messaging
13. Mathematical Modeling
14. Office Automation
15. Programming Languages
16. Shell Compilers
17. Spreadsheets
18. System Administration
19. The Toolchest
20. Windows
• Chapter 12: UNIX Meets the Real World
1. Databases and Database Management Systems
2. Distributed UNIX
3. Emulators and Coexistence
4. Fault Tolerance, Transaction Processing
5. International UNIX
6. Mainframes and Supercomputers
7. Micros
8. Network File Systems
9. Networking
10. Parallel Processing
11. Real-Time Processing, UNIX Executives
12. Security
13. Workstations

Mandatory reading, a must read, read or I'll shoot you, read it god-damnit, its an excellent, brilliant and humoristic book. Can't be missed.