Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment

“This is the definitive reference book for any serious or professional UNIX systems programmer. Rago has updated and extended the original Stevens classic while keeping true to the original.”

—Andrew Josey, Director, Certification, The Open Group, and Chair of the POSIX 1003.1 Working Group

For more than twenty years, serious C programmers have relied on one book for practical, in-depth knowledge of the programming interfaces that drive the UNIX and Linux kernels: W. Richard Stevens’ Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment. Now, once again, Stevens’ colleague Stephen A. Rago has thoroughly updated this classic. The new third edition supports today’s leading platforms, reflects new technical advances and best practices, and fully aligns with Version 4 of the Single UNIX Specification.

Rago carefully retains the spirit and approach that have made this book so valuable. Building on Stevens’ pioneering work, he begins with files, directories, and processes, carefully laying the groundwork for more advanced techniques, such as signal handling and terminal I/O. Next, he thoroughly covers threads and multithreaded programming (including the Native POSIX Thread Library), as well as socket-based IPC.

This edition covers more than seventy new interfaces, including POSIX asynchronous I/O, spin locks, barriers, and POSIX semaphores. Most obsolete interfaces have been removed, except for a few that remain ubiquitous. Nearly all examples have been tested on five modern platforms: Red Hat 2.6.x, Solaris 10.3, the 64-bit Intel version of OS X Version 10.6.8 (Darwin 10.8.0), FreeBSD 8.0, and, for the first time, Ubuntu (version 12.04, based on Linux 3.2).

As in previous editions, you’ll learn through examples, including more than ten thousand lines of downloadable, ANSI C source code. More than four hundred system calls and functions are demonstrated with concise, complete programs that clearly illustrate their usage, arguments, and return values. To tie together what you’ve learned, the book presents several chapter-length case studies, each reflecting contemporary environments.

Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment has helped generations of programmers write code with exceptional power, performance, and reliability. Now updated for today’s systems, this third edition will be even more valuable.

The late W. Richard Stevens was the acclaimed author of UNIX® Network Programming, Volumes 1 and 2, widely recognized as the classic texts in UNIX networking; TCP/IP Illustrated, Volumes 1-3; and the first edition of this book.

Stephen A. Rago is the author of UNIX® System V Network Programming (Addison-Wesley, 1993). Rago was one of the Bell Laboratories developers who built UNIX System V Release 4. He served as a technical reviewer for the first edition of Advanced Programming in the UNIX® Environment. Rago currently works as a research staff member in the Storage Systems Group at NEC Laboratories America.