Yesterday's news

My master's thesis project was written in PHP + MySQL. Back then I could install Linux, rebuild its kernel and do basic administrative work. All of that is mostly forgotten by now. Lately I've been contemplating Windows culture,  how it affects my quality of life as a programmer, and speculating about virtues of UNIX universe. Arguably, even such remote offsprings as Java and Ruby can be related to UNIX culture. And who of Fortune 100 companies run Microsoft? Google? Facebook? Wikipedia? None!

Thus I decided to refresh my UNIX. I started with quick review of linages and distributions. Of hundreds of them, I centered on Debian, FreeBSD, and MINIX. Debian -- because it's the biggest and longest surviving truly non-commercial project. FreeBSD -- because it seems to be the most authentic descendant of the original UNIX. And MINIX -- because it is a minimalistic UNIX-like OS that has a companion book explaining low-level kernel design, complete with source code.

At the moment, I've installed MINIX in a VM and am playing with the shell. I've also identified a few key topics and did some significant googling to find best articles to quickly get myself up to speed (the ones that I both read and loved are highlighted in bold).

• Basic Principles
  • UNIX For Beginners (13 pages) -- basic command line concepts (along with a bunch of funny archaic bullshit)
  • The Unix Time-sharing System (10 pages) -- the original UNIX article by UNIX authors Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, published back in 1974
• Shell
  • An Introduction to the UNIX Shell (23 pages) -- the original shell article by Steve Bourne, the author of the first scriptable UNIX shell
  • Learning the bash Shell
• Popular commands & utilities
  • http://www.math.harvard.edu/computing/unix/unixcommands.html
  • Unix Power Tools
  • sed and awk
  • vi and vim
  • emacs ?
• Common directories
  • Unix Directory Structure
  • FHS
  • File System Hierarchy Standard
• How the system looks from inside the C program
  • UNIX Programming — Second Edition (15 pages) -- writing basic console programs in C
  • The Unix Programming Environment
• Boot sequence
  • Unix System Administration Handbook (Chapter 2)
• How the system works under the hood (I/O, Multitasking, Processes, Boot Sequence, Swapping etc.)
  • Design of the Unix operating system
  • Operating Systems Design and Implementation
• Networking and Inter-process communication
  • Berkley Sockets API: free online guide and a great book
    
  • Signals, Pipes, Queues, Semaphores, Shared Memory: free online guide and another great book
    
• Advanced stuff -- async I/O etc.?
• Graphical desktops: Gnome & KDE
• Philosophy and general wisdom
  • The Art of UNIX Programming

Of all the books praised on the Internet my local library had Unix System Administration Handbook, A Practical Guide to Linux, by Mark G. Sobell  and Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks -- all three are highly praised books.

Let the fun begin!

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