Any program worth its salt uses operating system services. Even a simple program, if practical, reads input and produces output. And, most applications have more complex needs. They need to find out the time, use the network, or start and communicate with other processes. Systems programming really means nothing more than writing software that uses these operating system services.UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4 gives you the nitty-gritty details on how UNIX interacts with applications. If you're writing an application from scratch, or if you're porting an application to any System V.4 platform, you need this book.The first part of the book presents simple functions and concepts supported by numerous code fragment examples and short demonstration programs. These examples become building blocks for the application program examples that appear later in the book to illustrate more advanced, complex functions.UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4 is thorough and complete and offers advice on:
Working with low-level I/O routines and the standard I/O library
Creating and deleting files and directories, changing file attributes, processing multiple input streams, file and record locking, and memory-mapped files
Reading, printing, and setting the system time and date
Determining who is logged in, times users log in and out, how to change a program's effective user ID or group ID, and writing set user ID programs
Changing system configuration parameters for resource limits
Creating processes, job control, and signal handling
Using pipes, FIFOs, UNIX-domain sockets, message queues, semaphores, and shared memory for interprocess communication
Reading and setting serial line characteristics including baud rate, echoing, and flow control
Network programming with Berkeley sockets, Transport Layer Interface (TLI), a less popular but more flexible interface to network programming, and the data link provider interface
David A. Curry has been programming and administering UNIX systems since 1978. He has authored books on UNIX and C programming and UNIX security. Dave has worked for the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, SRI International, and the Purdue University Engineering Computer Network. He currently serves as the Purdue Computer Emergency Response Team's representative to the Forum of Incident Response and Security Teams. Dave's hobbies include amateur radio and reading military and science fiction, but most of his time is spent trying to keep up with the kids.
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects. The animal featured on the cover of UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4 is a lion, a large, carnivorous cat inhabiting western India and Africa south of the Sahara. The most sociable of cats, lions live in prides consisting of one to four males and a collection of up to thirty females and cubs. However, the members of a pride are seldom all together at one time, instead moving about their territory as individuals or small groups. A pride's territory may be anywhere from 15 to 150 square miles, depending on the abundance of food, and is marked by scent and roaring.Lions eat both fresh kill and carrion-dead animals or the kill of other animals. When they do kill, they show a preference for large prey such as zebra or wilde beest which will feed the entire pride. Females do the majority of the hunting, frequently working cooperatively to encircle or bring down large game. During the hunt, lions are careful to move under cover of darkness or foliage, but tend to disregard the wind direction and thus frequently give themselves away. UNIX and its attendant programs can be unruly beasts. Nutshell Handbooks help you tame them. ... Edie Freedman designed this cover and the entire UNIX bestiary that appears on Nutshell Handbooks, using a 19th-century engraving from the Dover Pictorial Archive. The cover layout was produced with Quark XPress 3.3 using the ITC Garamond font.The inside layout was designed by Edie Freedman, Jennifer Niederst, and Nancy Priest. Text was prepared by Erik Ray in SGML DocBook 2.4 DTD. The print version of this book was created by translating the SGML source into a set of gtroff macros using a filter developed at ORA by Norman Walsh. Steve Talbott designed and wrote the underlying macro set on the basis of the GNU troff -gs macros; Lenny Muellner adapted them to SGML and implemented the book design. The GNU groff text formatter version 1.09 was used to generate PostScript output. The text and heading fonts are ITC Garamond Light and Garamond Book. The illustrations that appear in the book were created in Macromedia Freehand 5.0 by Chris Reilley.
Comments about O'Reilly Media UNIX System Programming for System VR4:
UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4 is MUST have for any UNIX programmer out there. Though it says SVR4, it contains information about BSD variants, too. The book provides in depth information and is a lot easier to flip through than man pages!