Sometimes, they are useful for a lifetime
And sometimes, they barely hold your attention. However, the recent acquisition is the former. I got the mammoth of a book, over the weekend; it weighs a ton and I’ll be sleeping with it, clutched tight in my hands.
If you already have the tomb by tanenbaum of similar name, the unix programming interface, you probably are not going to glean much value from this one (you can thank POSIX for maintaining a modicum of consistency over the years and some would vehemently contest that). That said, if you write code for *nix systems, it definitely deserves the shelf-space as much as any other programming book.
In the few hours I’ve spent with it, I’ve already learnt and have had a few concepts made clear. It is definitely not a linear read and there is quite a lot of interesting things to read about. I’m currently working through some fun tests of my understanding of pthreads. Watch for those here.
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