A.P. Lawrence

The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix Operating System

• Leffler, McKusick, Karels and Quarterman
• Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
• ISBN: 0-201-06196-1

Order (or just read more about) Design and Implementation (New Edition!) from Amazon.com

One of my favorite books is getting old.

Not a lot of people care too much about 4.3BSD (though Linux fans might find more here than the rest of us). This book, affectionately known as the "Devil" book because of it's cover, is 4.3BSD internals, and most of us are far more interested in System V today.

Still, I think this is worth reading. The text is clear and easy to read, and it's interesting to compare 4.3 with System V (assuming you know enough about System V to make the comparisons.)

My copy was re-printed in 1990, so that should give you some idea of what state of the art was when this was written.

Still, there is knowledge to be gained here. SVR4 is not the only way to do Unix, and having an understanding of another approach can be useful. It is also true that SVR4 has borrowed and integrated a lot of BSD, so knowing about this can help you understand SVR4 better.

If nothing else, you should have this just because you should have the Devil Book.

Comments /Books/devil.html
BooksDevil :
---July 11, 2004



Add your comments

Why no "Digg this!" etc.?

Control Spam and Viruses

Run your own mailserver

Enter your email address for automatic notification of new posts here
(be sure to whitelist 'feedburner.com' if you use spam filtering)

Lone-Tar Backup and Disaster Recovery
for Linux and Unix

Have you tried Searching this site?

Unix/Linux/Mac OS X support by phone, email or on-site: Support Rates

This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more. We appreciate comments and article submissions.

Publishing your articles here