Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

For my first book review on the Big Site, Im going to take a look at Programming with GNU Software by Mike Loukides and Andy Oram. This book is intended as an overview of the tools for software development in the GNU environment. Let me begin by giving you the expectations I had coming into this, because as we all know, those impact your view of a book more than anything. I have several years experience developing in C++ on Wintel machines. I am really a novice Linux user, although my knowledge of specific applications, ie. Apache, is pretty extensive. I was hoping to get one of two things out of this book. 1) A thorough enough intro to Unix enviorons to actually write some advanced code on my own, or 2) knowledge that would be applicable to tweak those not so friendly apps into running on my system. What I got was a little of both. The book starts out with an overview of EMACS, the beefcake GNU editor. I have always used EMACS anyway because it was the default editor for the Amiga, one of my early computers, and I have never had much desire to learn vi beyond basic functions. The coverage of EMACS is excellent for a new user, and the authors establish a writing style that is clear, user friendly, and speckled with dry Geek-humor. All in all an excellent start. We then move along to a good look at gcc/g++ and the associated programs used for compiling. Being several years removed from my college courses on Unix this was a great refresher, and an excellent look at compiler functionality for users just getting into programming.The weakest section of the book deals with some basic Unix programming techniques for error handling and system signals. This, while well written, really belongs in a more voluminous and complete guide to Unix Programming. While important, I would expect to see other issues, such as the math libraries which the author noted were dissimilar to ANSI C, covered before system signals.The book finished with a look at RCS, a GNU source management system. A good overview, and worth reading for anyone interested in programming Rating 4.7 penguin afros (out of a possible 5.2) on our scale. While this book turned out to be note exactly what I was looking for I would still recommend it for someone looking to get into Linux and GNU programming. It would best serve you however as one of a suite of books including a good C/C++ book and a Unix programming reference such as The Unix Programming Environmnet (Prentice Hall, 1984).