Product: 1584503718

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.
Rating: 2
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