Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 21:28:01 -0500 (EST) From: Tim McMillen <timcm@umich.edu> To: Anthony Rubin <tonyr@generalsearch.net> Cc: Shanon Fernald <sfernald@epicor.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Recommendation of FreeBSD Programming Book Requested Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.4.10.10011072102560.24318-100000@qbert.gpcc.itd.umich.edu> In-Reply-To: <00110716470800.20197@tonyr.office.generalsearch.net>
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You won't find any books specifically on programming for FreeBSD. The one recommended by Anthony may be the best to use in conjunction with reading FreeBSD sources. You do program in C right? Almost all of the operating system code in FreeBSD is in C. If you don't have much C programming experience then I would say "The C programming Language 2nd Ed." by Kernighan and Ritchie is a must. It is the best written book I know. It is terse and complete at the same time. Almost every sentance in the book is useful. In disagreement wiht the quote below, I think you really can learn at least a very good start to programming from a book. (Especially K&R). But eventually I think reading code is the only way. Here's a quote from "How to Become a Hacker" by Eric Raymond http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html He extolls OpenSource in general but specifically Linux. "I can't give complete instructions on how to learn to program here -- it's a complex skill. But I can tell you that books and courses won't do it (many, maybe most of the best hackers are self-taught). You can learn language features -- bits of knowledge -- from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading code and (b) writing code. Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models. Finding good code to read used to be hard, because there were few large programs available in source for fledgeling hackers to read and tinker with. This has changed dramatically; open-source software, programming tools, and operating systems (all built by hackers) are now widely available. " Good luck, welcome away from the Dark Side 8^) Tim Here are some other books you may be interested in: "The design and implementation of the 4.4BSD operating system" by Mckusick et al --a very good book about the internals of the BSD kernel. I have no experience with this last one. Just saw it in yabl (a booklist) TITLE: The Berkeley UNIX Environment AUTHOR: Horspool, R. Nigel SUBJECT: C Programming, BSD Unix PUBLISHER: Prentice Hall DATE: 1992 PAGES: 379 ISBN: 0-13-089368-4 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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