The UNIX Philosophy

Contents......Page 4
Preface......Page 7
Acknowledgments......Page 12
Introduction......Page 14
1. The UNIX Philosophy: A Cast of Thousands......Page 17
The UNIX Philosophy in a Nutshell......Page 20
2. One Small Step for Humankind......Page 24
Tenet 1: Small is Beautiful......Page 25
Software Engineering Made Easy......Page 27
Tenet 2: Make Each Program Do One Thing Well......Page 34
3. Rapid Prototyping for Fun and Profit......Page 38
Tenet 3: Build a Prototype as Soon as Possible......Page 42
The Three Systems of Man......Page 44
The First System of Man......Page 45
The Second System of Man......Page 49
The Third System of Man......Page 52
Building the Third System......Page 55
4. The Portability Priority......Page 60
Tenet 4: Choose Portability over Efficiency......Page 62
Case Study: The Atari 2600......Page 68
Tenet 5: Store Numerical Data in Flat ASCII Files......Page 71
Case Study: One UNIX Philosopher's Bag of Tricks......Page 76
5. Now THAT'S Leverage!......Page 80
Tenet 6: Use Software Leverage to Your Advantage......Page 82
Tenet 7: Use Shell Scripts to Increase Leverage and Portability......Page 91
6. The Perils of Interactive Programs......Page 100
Tenet 8: Avoid Captive User Interfaces......Page 103
Tenet 9: Make Every Program a Filter......Page 112
The UNIX Environment: Using Programs as Filters......Page 114
7. More UNIX Philosophy: Ten Lesser Tenets......Page 118
1. Allow the User to Tailor the Environment......Page 119
2. Make Operating System Kernels Small and Lightweight......Page 121
3. Use Lower Case and Keep It Short......Page 122
4. Save Trees......Page 124
5. Silence is Golden......Page 126
6. Think Parallel......Page 128
7 The Sum of the Parts is Greater Than the Whole......Page 130
8. Look for the 90 Percent Solution......Page 132
9. Worse is Better......Page 134
10. Think Hierarchically......Page 136
8.  Making UNIX Do One Thing Well......Page 139
The UNIX Philosophy: Putting It All Together......Page 144
9. UNIX and Other Operating System Philosophies......Page 148
The Atari Home Computer: Human Engineering as Art......Page 149
MS-DOS: Over 70 Million Users Can't Be Wrong......Page 151
Open VMS: The Antithesis of UNIX?......Page 154
Index......Page 159