Product Description

"The first edition of this book has always been kept within arm's reach of my desk due to the wonderful explanations of all areas of the Linux userspace API. This second edition greatly overshadows the first one, and will replace it."
--Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel programmer

Develop Software that Leverages the Full Power of Today's Linux

Linux Application Development, Second Edition, is the definitive reference for Linux programmers at all levels of experience, including C programmers moving from other operating systems. Building on their widely praised first edition, leading Linux programmers Michael Johnson and Erik Troan systematically present the key APIs and techniques you need to create robust, secure, efficient software or to port existing code to Linux.

This book has been fully updated for the Linux 2.6 kernel, GNU C library version 2.3, the latest POSIX standards, and the Single Unix Specification, Issue 6. Its deep coverage of Linux-specific extensions and features helps you take advantage of the full power of contemporary Linux. Along the way, the authors share insights, tips, and tricks for developers working with any recent Linux distribution, and virtually any version of Unix.

Topics include

• Developing in Linux: understanding the operating system, licensing,
• and documentation
• The development environment: compilers, linker and loader, and unique
• debugging tools
• System programming: process models, file handling, signal processing, directory operations, and job control
• Terminals, sockets, timers, virtual consoles, and the Linux console
• Development libraries: string matching, terminal handling, command-line parsing, authentication, and more
• Hundreds of downloadable code samples

New to this edition

• The GNU C library (glibc), underlying standards, and test macros
• Writing secure Linux programs, system daemons, and utilities
• Significantly expanded coverage of memory debugging, including Valgrind and mpr
• Greatly improved coverage of regular expressions
• IPv6 networking coverage, including new system library interfaces for using IPv6 and IPv4 interchangeably
• Coverage of strace, ltrace, real-time signals, poll and epoll system calls, popt library improvements, Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), qdbm, and much more
• Improved index and glossary, plus line-numbered code examples

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #455057 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 736 pages

From the Back Cover

"The first edition of this book has always been kept within arm's reach of my desk due to the wonderful explanations of all areas of the Linux userspace API. This second edition greatly overshadows the first one, and will replace it."
--Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux kernel programmer

Develop Software that Leverages the Full Power of Today's Linux

Linux Application Development, Second Edition, is the definitive reference for Linux programmers at all levels of experience, including C programmers moving from other operating systems. Building on their widely praised first edition, leading Linux programmers Michael Johnson and Erik Troan systematically present the key APIs and techniques you need to create robust, secure, efficient software or to port existing code to Linux.

This book has been fully updated for the Linux 2.6 kernel, GNU C library version 2.3, the latest POSIX standards, and the Single Unix Specification, Issue 6. Its deep coverage of Linux-specific extensions and features helps you take advantage of the full power of contemporary Linux. Along the way, the authors share insights, tips, and tricks for developers working with any recent Linux distribution, and virtually any version of Unix.

Topics include

• Developing in Linux: understanding the operating system, licensing,
• and documentation
• The development environment: compilers, linker and loader, and unique
• debugging tools
• System programming: process models, file handling, signal processing, directory operations, and job control
• Terminals, sockets, timers, virtual consoles, and the Linux console
• Development libraries: string matching, terminal handling, command-line parsing, authentication, and more
• Hundreds of downloadable code samples

New to this edition

• The GNU C library (glibc), underlying standards, and test macros
• Writing secure Linux programs, system daemons, and utilities
• Significantly expanded coverage of memory debugging, including Valgrind and mpr
• Greatly improved coverage of regular expressions
• IPv6 networking coverage, including new system library interfaces for using IPv6 and IPv4 interchangeably
• Coverage of strace, ltrace, real-time signals, poll and epoll system calls, popt library improvements, Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM), qdbm, and much more
• Improved index and glossary, plus line-numbered code examples

About the Author

Michael K. Johnson is an operating system engineer at Specifix. He was formerly an operating system developer for Red Hat, where he managed the kernel team for three and a half years, and was founding technical leader of the Fedora Project. He occasionally teaches full-day tutorials on Linux application development.

Erik W. Troan, cofounder and Executive VP of Operating Systems at Specifix, was formerly Vice President of Product Engineering at Red Hat, where he was responsible for specifying and building technologies such as RPM, Linux operating systems, the Red Hat Network, high-performance Web servers, and the infrastructure for Red Hat's Web site.

Customer Reviews

I keep coming back to this book
I think this is easily the most useful book on Linux that I own. When I bought it I though `oh yeah, I'll learn one or two things from it'. It's superb! All the stuff on using the development tools is great. I didn't know about electric fence for example. It's saved my life twice now - once with its good coverage of using serial ports and now with pseudo tty's. I just can't find this information accurately anywhere else. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't cover everything. No kernel programming or stuff like that, but then it's not supposed to. Great, examples that are actually useful. Highly recommented.

Enlightening Introduction plus Excellent Reference Book
This book was written with an easy to read style, and the content is excellent. I'll forgive them for not including anything related to X11 programming, but they mention that their reason was that X Windows programming is not specific to Linux, and this is a *LINUX* programming book. Well fine, but I still have to find a book on X Programming. Imagine a book on Windows NT Programming that skipped all the GUI parts. I guess the Unix crowd is 10 years behind the NT crowd in acceptance of GUIs.

Reading this book made many of the arcane details of Unix architecture make sense, finally. I have read many Linux books, and most are long on technical drivel and short on enlightenment. If you are enlightened, you don't need the drivel, because the technical details are easy to absorbe and remember once they make sense.

This book excels at making sense of Linux. It should have been called "Making Sense of Linux Application Development", because that's what it is. You could probably get a lot out of it, even if you don't know C very well or you aren't all that interested in C programming in Linux. The explanations are clearly presented, and the chapters stand alone, and are a great reference material, as well as interesting general reading for those interested in the internals of Linux.

This book explains a lot of services that the kernel provides, especially in regards to the Linux process model and unix filesystems, as well as interprocess communications (Unix domain sockets) and network programming (TCP/IP sockets).

CAVEAT: This shouldn't be your *first* Linux book. There's a lot of material besides the writing of the code that you need to cover first. To get you comfy in the classic Unix shell environment read Hands On Unix, by Mark Sobell.

The best Linux programming book out there
This is an excellent, coherent introduction to the Linux API and the standard Linux programming tools. Someone with a good grasp of C will be able to efficiently program in the Linux environment using this book as a reference. Although 500+ pages, most of it is directed to knuckle-dragging "got to get something done right" programmers - in other words, there aren't many pages that stray from the core of Linux programming. I have read and own many other Linux books; this one is the best. If you want to learn how to program for Linux, learn some C and read (and study and compile the examples) this book.