Standards and Portability in TLPI

As Linux becomes more and more prevalent, many programmers are targeting just one system: Linux. For these programmers, The Linux Programming Interface is ideal.

However, all the world is not Linux, and many of the most interesting UNIX applications need to be truly portable across systems: Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, and so on. For these applications, following portable programming practices and adhering to formal standards such as POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification are important.

Although I've focused on Linux in the book, I've also given close attention to formal and implementation standards, and clearly distinguished details that are Linux-specific from the features that are common across most or all UNIX implementations. This means that TLPI will be useful to programmers working on any UNIX system (but it won't provide you with too many of the nonstandard and system-specific details of those other systems). That's why we subtitled the book A Linux and UNIX System Programming Handbook.

A few statistics illustrate TLPI's emphasis on standards and portability. Of the just over half a million words in the book, here are a few word counts:

POSIX, 714
SUSv3/SUSv4, 730
standard(s)/nonstandard/standardized, 685
portable/nonportable/portability/portably, 231
UNIX, 1039
BSD, 254
System V (excluding discussion of System V IPC), 108

Web site revisions

I've started making some more substantial additions and changes to the website for my book. With the latest revisions, you can now see:

• A more detailed description of the book
• The short and long table of contents
• The preface
• The index
• A sample chapter from the book (Chapter 4: File I/O: The Universal I/O Model)
• The source code of all of the example programs in the book, with each file shown as a separate web page (a tarball of the source code will appear later).
  

Chapter 4 available online

No Starch Press now has a sample chapter from my book available online: Chapter 4: File I/O: The Universal I/O Model. You can find the chapter here.

Off to the printer today!

The files go to the printer today. All 1552 pages...

Complete cover

The folk at No Starch have done a fantastic job with the cover! The text color on the front got tweaked a little, and now we have the spine and back cover design as well. Here's the complete cover.


Front cover photo: Rob Suisted
Back cover photo: Lynley Cook
Cover Design: Octopod Studios

Last changes today

The release of Linux 2.6.35 necessitated what is hopefully the last change I make to the book (in the preface). Files should go the printer this week!

Index

We're getting close now. The index is nearly done. It has about 5900 entries, with about 9600 locators. (I've rounded the numbers because they'll probably change a little as we do some fine tuning.) We're typesetting the index small (8.5 point), but it's still going to run to 60 pages. Current target is for files to go to the printer in about a week, and for the printing to be finished near the end of August, which means available in September.

Revised ETA (again!)

A few people have been asking: where's the book? I'd like to know too! But, seriously, production has been a much bigger task than the publisher or I expected, and we've had to slip the date again. Our ETA is now August.

Cover

We've finalized a cover for the book, based on Rob Suisted's image of a Black Tree Fern. Here it is:

Beginnings of a web site / some example code

I've started on the beginnings of a web site for the book. There's still many design issues to sort out, but for now I wanted to put some of the book code online, to get feedback on the presentation of that code. Take a look here to see the code from Chapters 3 to 12, and send me comments at mtk AT man7.org, if you want.

Attending LF Collaboration Summit

I'll be at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, 14-16 April in San Francisco.

Revised ETA

Production is taking a bit longer than expected. ETA is now June 2010.