Computer Programming Ebooks collection

You know the real trouble with Unix? The real trouble is that it became so popular. It wasn’t meant to be popular. It was meant for a few folks working away in their labs, using Digital Equipment Corporation’s old PDP-11 computer. I used to have one of those. A comfortable, room-sized machine. Fast—ran an instruction in roughly a microsecond. An elegant instruction set (real programmers, you see, program in assembly code). Toggle switches on the front panel. Lights to show you what was in the registers. You didn’t have to toggle in the boot program anymore, as you did with the PDP-1 and PDP-4, but aside from that it was still a real computer. Not like those toys we have today that have no flashing lights, no register switches. You can’t even single-step today’s machines. They always run at full speed.

Foreword by By Donald A. Norman

Contents:

• Part 1: User Friendly?
  • 1 Unix - The World’s First Computer Virus [ History of the Plague ~ Sex, Drugs, and Unix ~ Standardizing Unconformity ~ Unix Myths ]
  • 2 Welcome, New User! - Like Russian Roulette with Six Bullets Loaded [ Cryptic Command Names ~ Accidents Will Happen ~ Consistently Inconsistent ~ Online Documentation ~ Error Messages and Error Checking, NOT! ~ The Unix Attitude ]
  • 3 Documentation? - What Documentation? [ On-line Documentation ~ This Is Internal Documentation? ~ For Programmers, Not Users ~ Unix Without Words: A Course Proposal ]
  • 4 Mail - Don’t Talk to Me, I’m Not a Typewriter! [ Sendmail: The Vietnam of Berkeley Unix ~ Subject: Returned Mail: User Unknown ~ From: ~ Apple Computer’s Mail Disaster of 1991 ]
  • 5 Snoozenet - I Post, Therefore I Am [ Netnews and Usenet: Anarchy Through Growth ~ Newsgroups ~ Alt.massive.flamage ~ This Information Highway Needs Information ~ rn, trn: You Get What You Pay for ~ When in Doubt, Post ~ Seven Stages of Snoozenet ]
  • 6 Terminal Insanity - Curses! Foiled Again! [ Original Sin ~ The Magic of Curses ]
  • 7 The X-Windows Disaster - How to Make a 50-MIPS Workstation Run Like a 4.77MHz IBM PC [ X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster ~ X Myths ~ X Graphics: Square Peg in a Round Hole ~ X: On the Road to Nowhere ]
• Part 2: Programmer’s System?
  • 8 csh, pipes, and find - Power Tools for Power Fools [ The Shell Game ~ Shell Programming ~ Pipes ~ Find ]
  • 9 Programming - Hold Still, This Won’t Hurt a Bit [ The Wonderful Unix Programming Environment ~ Programming in Plato’s Cave ~ “It Can’t Be a Bug, My Makefile Depends on It!” ~ If You Can’t Fix It, Restart It! ]
  • 10 C++ - The COBOL of the 90s [ The Assembly Language of Object-Oriented Programming ~ Syntax Syrup of Ipecac ~ Abstract What? ~ C++ Is to C as Lung Cancer Is to Lung ~ The Evolution of a Programmer ]
• Part 3: Sysadmin’s Nightmare
  • 11 System Administration - Unix’s Hidden Cost [ Keeping Unix Running and Tuned ~ Disk Partitions and Backups ~ Configuration Files ~ Maintaining Mail Services ~ Where Did I Go Wrong? ]
  • 12 Security - Oh, I’m Sorry, Sir, Go Ahead, I Didn’t Realize You Were Root [ The Oxymoronic World of Unix Security ~ Holes in the Armor ~ The Worms Crawl In ]
  • 13 The File System - Sure It Corrupts Your Files, But Look How Fast It Is! [ What’s a File System? ~ UFS: The Root of All Evil ]
  • 14 NFS - Nightmare File System [ Not Fully Serviceable ~ No File Security ~ Not File System Specific? (Not Quite) ]
• Part 4: Et Cetera
  • A Epilogue - Enlightenment Through Unix
  • B Creators Admit C, Unix Were Hoax - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
  • C The Rise of Worse Is Better - By Richard P. Gabriel
  • D Bibliography - Just When You Thought You Were Out of the Woods…

Download free

The Unix Haters Handbook.pdf

(360 pages pdf file, 3.5 MB).