Publisher Prentice Hall has allowed us to share a chapter from an upcoming book by Arnold Robbins, “Linux Programming by Example: The Fundamentals.” The chapter is entitled “User Level Memory Management,” and is the book's third.

Robbins, who is well-known as the maintainer of gawk (GNU Awk), teaches the fundamental Linux system call APIs by presenting code from everyday production programs. This approach permits the reader to see how Linux APIs are used, in addition to getting a handle on practical issues such as performance, portability and robustness.

The basic APIs which Robbins covers, include: Memory Management, File input/output; File metadata; Processes and signals; Users and groups; Programming support (sorting, argument parsing); Internationalization and Debugging.

Author Arnold Robbins is fond of Star Wars, and likens Linux programming to the arts of the Jedi Masters. “In the hands of a Jedi Knight, a light saber is both a powerful weapon and a thing of beauty. Its use demonstrates the power, knowledge, control of the Force, and arduous training of the Jedi who wields it. The elegance of the light saber mirrors the elegance of the original UNIX API design. There, too, the studied, precise use of the APIs and the Software Tools and GNU design principles lead to today's powerful, flexible, capable GNU/Linux system. This system demonstrates the knowledge and understanding of the programmers who wrote all its components.”

Robbins is also author of UNIX In a Nutshell, Learning the Korn Shell and Effective awk Programming.

Book chapters include:

1. Introduction
2. Arguments, Options, and the Environment
3. User-Level Memory Management
4. Files and File I/O
5. Directories and File Metadata
6. General Library Interfaces – Part 1
7. Putting It All Together: ls
8. Filesystems and Directory Walks
9. Process Management and Pipes
10. Signals
11. User and Group ID Numbers and Permissions
12. General Library Interfaces – Part 2
13. Internationalization and Localization
14. Extended Interfaces
15. Debugging
16. Tying It Together – A Project

Chet Ramey, co-author and maintainer of the BASH Shell, provides this testimonial: “This is an excellent introduction to Linux programming. The topics are well-chosen and lucidly presented. I learned things myself, especially about internationalization, and I've been at this for quite a while.”

The first edition of “Linux Programming by Example: The Fundamentals” is set to launch April 15. More information about it can be found at Prentis Hall.

Read “User Level Memory Management” sample chapter (900k PDF download)

 
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