Ravin’s Reviews > The Art of UNIX Programming > Status Update

The one thing unix got "wrong" is the separation between mechanism and policy. The relationship is policy utilizes the mechanism, but mechanism is independent of policy. Policy always evolve, mechanism stay same very long time. In the long term, however, it may turn out that this ‘mistake’ confers a critical advantage — because policy tends to have a short lifetime, mechanism a long one.

Actual software used as case studies in this book. cdrtools tool used to write cd-roms, xcdroast with frontend for it. fetchmail retrieves mail from remote-mail servers using
the POP3 or IMAP post-office protocols.
GIMP for image manipulation. mutt a text based mail agent. xmlto renders various documents

Note to self. The book borrows a lot of reference from Zen. Good thing I'm familiar with it. Zen not as a religion but a mental discipline.

The part "Context" is to set history and motivation of what becomes Unix. The part "Design" layout the principles that help to design solutions that solve problems. The part "Tools" talks about tools in Unix to solve actual problems. The part "Community" talks about human2human interaction that make Unix very effective culture

"Knowledge lets you deduce the right
thing to do; expertise makes the right thing a reflex, hardly requiring conscious thought at all.", Exactly what I'm looking, mental shortcuts expert innately know, but have difficulty expressing it. I decide to read the history part, because the intuition behind Unix philosophy lay behind the historic background. Certain history bites need to take a grain of salt

The book structure is ::

I.Context
- Philosphy
- History
- Constrasts
II. Design
- Modularity
- Textuality
- Transparency
- Multipgrogramming
- Minilanguages
- COnfiguration
- Interfaces
- Optimization
- Complexity
III.Implementation
- Languages
- Tools
- Reuse
- Documentation
- Open Source
- Futures

I.Context
- Philosphy
- History
- Constrasts
II. Design
- Modularity
- Textuality
- Transparency
- Multipgrogramming
- Minilanguages
- COnfiguration
- Interfaces
- Optimization
- Complexity
III.Implementation
- Languages
- Tools
- Reuse
- Documentation
- Open Source
- Futures

From what I researched this books is not about Unix programming, but on the design and technical decisions that made Unix a successful piece of software. I'm interested to know what are this ideas and how they correlate to each other. It s a thick book 533 pages, I probable will skip some chapter that touches on historic background. 533 pages/15 page per day = 33 days. Should be ok.