100 Best Unix Books of All Time
We've researched and ranked the best unix books in the world, based on recommendations from world experts, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. Learn more
Tim O'ReillyThe Unix Programming Environment, by Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike. In addition to its articulation of the Unix tools philosophy that is so dear to my heart, the writing is a model of clarity and elegance. As a technical writer, I aspired to be as transparent as Kernighan. (Source)
In this authoritative work, Linux programming expert Michael Kerrisk provides detailed descriptions of the system calls and library functions that you need in order to master the craft of system programming, and accompanies his explanations with clear, complete example programs.
You'll find descriptions of over 500 system calls and library functions, and more than 200 example... more
Julia Evanshanging out with my favourite Linux book this morning. I love that the chapters are so short (usually less than 20 pages) and I always learn something interesting by picking a chapter and reading it. https://t.co/fZBNu8rfU8 (Source)
The Linux Command Line takes you from your very first terminal keystrokes to writing full programs in Bash, the most popular Linux shell (or command line). Along the way you'll learn the timeless skills handed down by generations of experienced, mouse-shunning gurus: file navigation, environment configuration, command chaining, pattern matching with regular expressions, and more.
In addition to that... more
You'll find this guide valuable whether you're interested in bash as a user interface or for its powerful programming capabilities. This book will teach you how to use bash's advanced command-line features, such as command history, command-line editing, and command completion.
This book also... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
From the Preface:
We have tried to retain the brevity of the first edition. C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book. We have improved the exposition of critical features, such as pointers, that are central to C programming. We have refined the... more
The latest edition of this bestselling reference brings Unix into the 21st century. It's been reworked to keep current with the broader state of Unix in today's world and highlight the strengths of this... more
With this essential guide, you'll learn everything you need to know to customize your system,... more
Cliff Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab when a 75-cent accounting error... more
James Stanley"The Cuckoo's Egg" by Clifford Stoll is another great book. I believe it's the first documented account of a computer being misused by a remote attacker. It talks about how Clifford attached physical teleprinters to the incoming phone lines so that he could see what the attacker was actually doing on the computer, and how he traced the attacker across several countries. (Source)
Writing... more
vi has been the standard editor for close to 30 years. Popular on Unix and Linux, it has a growing following on Windows systems, too. Most experienced system administrators cite vi as their tool of choice. And since 1986, this book has been the guide for vi.
However, Unix systems are not... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage. If you think you know all you need to know about regularexpressions, this book is a stunning... more
sed & awk describes two text processing programs that are mainstays of the UNIX programmer's toolbox.
sed is a "stream editor" for editing streams of text that might be too large to edit as a single file, or that might be generated on the fly as part of a larger data processing step. The most common operation done with sed is substitution, replacing one block of text with another.
awk is a complete programming language. Unlike many conventional languages, awk is "data driven" -- you specify what kind of data you are...
▪︎ the complete source code to an early version of the UNIX operating system; and
▪︎ a brilliant commentary on that code by John Lions
Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, and other UNIX luminaries have contributed new essays on the enduring value of this Computer Science masterpiece.
Lions’ marriage of source code with commentary was originally used as an operating systems textbook, a purpose for which it remains well-suited. As a self-study UNIX conceptual... more
Absolute FreeBSD is your complete guide to FreeBSD, the powerful UNIX-like operating system that's supported modern servers, desktops, and platforms for years. In this completely revised third edition, FreeBSD committer Michael W. Lucas will teach you how to install, configure, and manage FreeBSD-based systems.... more
The third edition of Understanding the Linux... more
Foreword by Henning Brauer, OpenBSD PF Developer
OpenBSD, the elegant, highly secure Unix-like operating system, is widely used as the basis for critical DNS servers, routers, firewalls, and more. This long-awaited second edition of Absolute OpenBSD maintains author Michael Lucas's trademark straightforward and practical approach that readers have enjoyed for years. You'll learn the intricacies of the platform, the technical details behind certain design decisions, and best practices, with bits of humor sprinkled... more
Linux Pocket Guide provides an organized learning path to help you gain mastery of the most useful and important... more
The Cathedral & the Bazaar is a must for anyone who cares about the future... more
Vim, like its classic ancestor vi, is a serious tool for programmers, web developers, and sysadmins. No other text editor comes close to Vim for speed and efficiency; it runs on almost every system imaginable and... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
- Red Hat Linux
- Solaris
- HP-UX
- FreeBSD
This book stresses a practical... more
Ideal for new and experienced users alike--including proficient Windows users and sysadmins--this updated second edition helps you solve a wide range of problems. You'll learn ways to handle... more
-- Presents information in step-by-step fashion
-- Covers all the features of the standard shell, with additional instructions for the Korn Shell
-- Teaches how to use the shell to tailor the UNIX environment less
Learning... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
The new edition of this indispensable reference has been fully updated for all the latest operating systems. Even more importantly, it has been extensively revised and... more
Learning how to interact and automate with Linux is essential for millions of professionals. Python makes it much easier. With this book, you'll learn how to... more
Love clearly distinguishes between POSIX standard functions and special services offered only by Linux. With a new chapter on multithreading, this updated and expanded edition provides an in-depth look at Linux from both a theoretical and applied perspective over... more
This second edition is a complete rewrite of the original book. It's packed with twice the pages and offers even more practical information for UNIX users and administrators. It covers features of many types of UNIX systems, including SunOS, Solaris, BSDI, AIX, HP-UX, Digital UNIX, Linux, and others. The first edition was practical, entertaining, and full of useful scripts, tips, and... more
This revised edition covers the regular expression flavors used by C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, and VB.NET. You’ll learn powerful new tricks, avoid flavor-specific gotchas, and save valuable time with this huge library of... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
In this collection of essays and articles, key members of Google's Site Reliability Team explain how and why their commitment to the entire lifecycle has enabled the company to successfully build, deploy, monitor, and maintain some of the largest software systems in the world. You'll learn the principles and practices that enable... more
A book by Git experts to turn you into a Git expert. Introduces the world of distributed version control Shows how to build a Git development workflow. less
Once you've built your foundation for penetration testing, you'll learn the... more
For those professionals new to networking and UNIX system programming, two... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Large-scale enterprise, cloud, and virtualized computing systems have introduced serious performance challenges. Now, internationally renowned performance expert Brendan Gregg has brought together proven methodologies, tools, and metrics for analyzing and tuning even the most complex environments. Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud focuses on Linux(R) and Unix(R) performance, while illuminating... more
The GNU Autotools make it easy for developers to create software that is portable across many Unix-like operating systems, and even Windows. Although the Autotools are used by thousands of open source software packages, they have a notoriously steep learning curve.
Autotools is the first book to offer programmers a tutorial-based guide to the GNU build system. Author John Calcote begins with an overview of high-level concepts and a hands-on tour of the... more
You'll quickly find answers to the annoying questions that generally come up when you're writing shell scripts: What characters do you need to quote? How do you get variable substitution to do exactly what you want? How do you use arrays? Updated for Bash version 4.4, this book has the answers to these and other problems in a format that... more
The book approaches Unix system administration from the perspective of your job -- the routine tasks and troubleshooting that make up your day. Whether you're dealing with frustrated users, convincing an uncomprehending management that you need new hardware, rebuilding the kernel, or simply... more
If you're an experienced Mac user, this updated edition teaches you all the basic commands you need to get started with Unix. You'll soon learn how to gain real control over your... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
Based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the new edition of this bestselling study guide covers the updated Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) and Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exams. RHCSA/RHCE Red Hat Linux Certification Study Guide, 7th Edition is fully revised to cover the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and the corresponding RHCSA and RHCE certification exams. This... more
After a quick review of Unix utilities, the book's authors take you step-by-step through the process of building shell scripts, debugging them, and understanding how they work... more
The fifth edition covers BIND 9.3.2, the most recent release of the BIND 9 series, as well as BIND 8.4.7. BIND 9.3.2 contains further improvements in security and IPv6 support, and important new... more
Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach is the first book that dissects the internals of the system, presenting a detailed picture that grows incrementally as you read. For example, you will learn the roles of the firmware, the bootloader, the Mach and BSD kernel components (including the... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
This book will teach you what you need to know so that you can write your own servers, debug your entire stack when things go awry, and understand how things are working under the hood.
more
Problems can crop up at any stage in porting. Special configuration is often required before you... more
Unlike so many books that focus on how to use UNIX, The UNIX Philosophy concentrates on answering the questions: `Why use UNIX in the first place?'. Readers will discover the rationale and reasons for such concepts as file system organization, user interface and other system characteristics. In an informative, non-technical fashion, The UNIX Philosophy explores the general... more
In this thoroughly revised edition, author and gawk lead developer Arnold Robbins describes the awk language and gawk program in detail, shows you how to use awk and gawk for problem solving, and then dives into... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.
This updated edition offers a tighter focus on Linux system essentials, as well as more coverage of new capabilities such as virtualization, wireless network management, and revision control with git. It also... more
Learn methods for filtering large files for specific content Acquire information not included in the current grep documentation Get several tricks for using variants such as... more
Autotools Autotools is the first book to offer programmers a tutorial-based guide to the GNU build system. Author John Calcote begins with an overview of high-level concepts and a quick hands-on tour of the philosophy and design of the... more
Small footprint operating systems, such as those driving the handheld devices that the baby dinosaurs are using on the cover, are just one of the cutting-edge applications you'll find in Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne's Operating System Concepts, Seventh Edition.
By staying current, remaining relevant, and adapting to emerging course needs, this market-leading text has continued to define the operating systems course. This Seventh Edition not only presents the latest and most relevant systems, it also digs deeper to... more
To get you started--whether you're on Windows, OS X, or Linux--author Jeroen Janssens introduces the Data Science Toolbox, an easy-to-install virtual environment packed with over 80 command-line tools.
Discover why the command line is an agile, scalable, and extensible technology. Even if you're already... more
Included are discussions on advanced routing protocols (RIPv2, OSPF, and BGP) and the gated software package that implements them,... more
Don't have time to read the top Unix books of all time? Read Shortform summaries.
Shortform summaries help you learn 10x faster by:
- Being comprehensive: you learn the most important points in the book
- Cutting out the fluff: you focus your time on what's important to know
- Interactive exercises: apply the book's ideas to your own life with our educators' guidance.