The Art of Unix Programming

Naming only ones I haven't seen mentioned in other comments: - Networking for Systems Administrators, by Michael W. Lucas. Its explicit goal is to teach you just enough about networking, from the electron up, that you can talk to an actual network engineer and not make a fool out of yourself. It's a phenomenally high-ROI read if networking isn't your strong suit. - The first 3 chapters of Mastering Regular Expressions. Regexes are up there with Vim keybindings in terms of sheer ubiquitous use no matter what stack you find yourself in. The rest of the book is excellent if you want to actually implement a regex engine. - The Art of Unix Programming. Less technical. Gives you an idea of why exactly 'nix machines are like that, especially older commands. The 18 rules of design are worth committing to memory. - The Linux Programming Interface. More technical. Pairs esp nicely with the above. Lots of practice C code one can run, plenty of short self-contained chapters. - Not a book, but an online paper: https://how.complexsystems.fail . I see echoes of this everywhere I work, and it often helps me understand what kinds of "bad" things are secretly highly evolved resiliency measures.…

If you want the philosophical approach to the way to do things on Unix systems, you can’t beat “The Art of Unix Programming” by ESR. That book flipped my whole understanding of the way to write code more than any other book.

* The Art of Unix Programming * The Art of Computer Programming

The Art of Unix Programming had an outsized impact on my career. It laid out Unix as a sensible, simple, professional, and enjoyable way to approach computing, and chasing the hacker dream advanced my career as long as I kept that passion alive. I wouldn't really get along with esr as a person these days, but TAOUP gave me the audacity to start making money with Linux, and I'm grateful for that.

* The Art of Unix Programming * Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective * SICP

The following is a list of my favorite books on software engineering, cyber-security, and the history of IT business development. Bowden, Mark (2011) Worm: The First Digital World War Brooks, Frederick (1995) Mythical Man-Month, 2nd ed. Christensen, Clayton (1997) Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail Hafner, Katie and Matthew Lyon (1996) Where Wizards Stay Up Late: Origins of the Internet Hunt, Andrew and David Thomas (1999) Pragmatic Programmer MacCormick, John (2012) Nine Algorithms that Changed the Future McConnell, Steve (2004) Code Complete, 2nd ed. Mitnick, Kevin and William Simon (2002) Art of Deception Poulsen, Kevin (2011) Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cyber-Crime Underworld Raymond, Eric (2003) Art of Unix Programming Stone, Brad (2013) The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon Torvalds, Linus and David Diamond (2001) Just for Fun: Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Wallace, James and Jim Erickson (1992) Hard Drive: Bill Gates and Making of the Microsoft Empire Williams, Sam (2002) Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software…

My take on some which I think should be atleast read once: 1) The unix programming environment 2) The design of the unix operating system 3) The Pragmatic Programmer 4) Programming Pearls 5) Computer Systems: A Programmers Prespective 6) K & R C 7) The art of Unix Programming. PS: I admit my bias towards systems.

The Art of Unix Programming. It teaches the "why"s, not just the "how"s.

Agreed on all points. Especially on TAoUP being a good expression of the philosophy---even if the philosophy is, of course, far from a silver bullet.

I have a pretty negative opinion on ESR these days. I could find technical arguments about many aspects of his good pieces of writing, and much of his writing is not good. His abilities as a coder are not generally remarkable, either. But mostly I don't think he's a good person. I would probably not say "Don't read ESR", but I think it has to be "Read ESR* " *but be aware that he's a polarizing figure and opinions of his merits differ (and if you happen to have a differing opinion, please use the reply button instead of the downvote button)

1) The Art of Unix Programming 2) TCP/IP Illustrated 3) 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

The Art of Unix Programming: http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/

Say what you want about ESR, but if I had never read "The Art of Unix Programming", my life would be unrecognisable and sad.

I am also self-taught, although I dropped out of University two years into a CompSci/Engineering double major, so I will recommend some resources to you that helped me immensely. Each of these books has an associated MIT course with lecture video, notes, etc. available online. First is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs[1], which you can read online, and the associated course at MIT, which is 6.001[2] Second is the famous 'Dragon Book', Compilers: Principals, Techniques and Tools[3] and the associated course which is 6.035[4] Extras would be the Python book 'How to think like a Computer Scientist'[5]. MIT course 6.00[6] uses the book as a reference, and the courseware is again available online. Other than that - the usual suspects on learning C (K&R), UNIX (TAOUP[7]), the bash shell along with grep, sed, awk, more algorithms(CLRS[8]), functional programming and machine learning. Take your time, it takes years to build the relevant experience and knowledge and you are never done.…