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Concept
The Unix Programming Environment
Summary
The Unix Programming Environment, first published in 1984 by Prentice Hall, is a book written by Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike, both of Bell Labs and considered an important and early document of the Unix operating system.
The book addresses the Unix philosophy of small cooperating tools with standardized inputs and outputs. Kernighan and Pike gives a brief description of the Unix design and the Unix philosophy:
Even though the UNIX system introduces a number of innovative programs and techniques, no single program or idea makes it work well. Instead, what makes it effective is the approach to programming, a philosophy of using the computer. Although that philosophy can't be written down in a single sentence, at its heart is the idea that the power of a system comes more from the relationships among programs than from the programs themselves. Many UNIX programs do quite trivial things in isolation, but, combined with other programs, become general and useful tools.
The authors further write that their goal for this book is "to communicate the UNIX programming philosophy."
The book starts off with an introduction to Unix for beginners. Next, it goes into the basics of the and shell. The reader is led through topics ranging from the use of filters, to how to use C for programming robust Unix applications, and the basics of grep, sed, make, and awk. The book closes with a tutorial on making a programming language parser with yacc and how to use troff with ms and mm to format documents, the preprocessors tbl, eqn, and pic, and making man pages with the man macro set. The appendices cover the ed editor and the abovementioned programming language, named hoc, which stands for "high-order calculator".
Although Unix still exists decades after the publication of this book, the book describes an already mature Unix: In 1984, Unix had already been in development for 15 years (since 1969), it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal 10 years earlier (SOSP, 1974, "The UNIX Timesharing System"), and at least seven official editions of its manuals had been published (see Version 7 Unix).
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