Books

[Updated Saturday, April 18, 2008 1230 IST]

The following is a collection of books for newbies, gnubies that I highly recommend.

Enjoy the learning experience!

Programming

• 1. Byron S. Gottfried. (June 1996). Schaum's Outline of Programming with C. New York: McGraw-Hill

Any good introductory book on programming in C will suffice. This book is excellent for beginners. At this level, a basic understanding of pointers will be useful.

After learning the basics of C programming, a good book for the introduction of GNU/Linux and shell programming is required.

• 2. Sumitabha Das. (1998). UNIX:Concepts and Applications. (2nd ed.). Tata-McGraw Hill

This is an excellent book for beginners that teaches shell programming.I started liking shell scripting only after reading this book. The best way to learn is to sit before a GNU/Linux computer, read the shell commands from the book and try it out immediately on the computer, read more and experiment more.

After an introduction to both C and shell programming, mastery of pointers is required. It will be of immense help to you if you master pointers before going into advanced C and GNU/Linux system programming.

• 3. Yashavant Kanetkar. Understanding Pointers in C. Nagpur, India: BPB Publications

The book is filled with examples. There are numerous programs that clearly illustrate the different notations and usage of pointers in C. You can read it like a story book and finish it quickly.

• 4. Robert Lafore. (2001). Object Oriented Programming in C++. (4th ed.). Sams.

Ignore the Turbo C++ part, and use g++ for learning C++ with this book. It covers the basics of object-oriented programming, and is a very good book to quickly refresh your object-oriented concepts.

• 5. Peter Norton, Alex Samuel, David Aitel, Eric Foster-Johnson, Leonard Richardson, Jason Diamon, Aleatha Parker, Michael Roberts. (2005). Beginning Python. Wrox.

A very basic, introductory book to get started with Python. Also covers specific modules of interest. A good Python reference book.

• 6. Debra Cameron, James Elliott, Marc Loy, Eric S. Raymond, Bill Rosenblatt. (December, 2004). Learning GNU Emacs. (3rd ed.). O'Reilly.

A basic, introductory book in getting started with GNU Emacs.

• 7. Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman, Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates. (October, 2004). Head First Design Patterns. O'Reilly.

An excellent book to get started on understanding design patterns. But, they use Java examples.

GNU/Linux System Programming

• 1. Kurt Wall. (December 1999). Linux Programming by Example. Que

This is an excellent book on GNU/Linux programming for beginners. The author provides very simple example programs to explain the concepts. It provides an introduction to shared memory, pipes, semaphores, and socket programming. You can check the author's website from http://www.kurtwerks.com for free source code and for information regarding his books.

• 2. Mark Mitchell, Jeffrey Oldham, and Alex Samuel (CodeSourcery LLC). (June 2001). Advanced Linux Programming. (1st. ed.). New Riders Publishing

The Advanced Linux Programming book is available online at http://www.advancedlinuxprogramming.com/. You can download the entire book and the relevant code examples. The book is released under the Open Publication License while the code examples are released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

• 3. W. Richard Stevens. (1990). UNIX Network Programming. Prentice Hall

This is a book for advanced network programming in UNIX. You can check the author's webpage at http://www.kohala.com/start/ for information about the book and his other books. For running the example network programs on Linux, there are some patches provided by Dan Kegel at http://www.kegel.com/unpv1.

Device Drivers & Kernel Development

I found the following books and links very useful in learning to write device drivers, and for kernel development.

• 1. Alessandro Rubini & Jonathan Corbet (June 2001). Linux Device Drivers. (2nd ed.). O'Reilly.

The Linux Device Drivers book is available online at http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/ (released under the GNU FreeDocumentation License). It is an excellent book for learning to write device drivers in Linux.

• 2. Daniel P. Bovet & Marco Cesati. (January 2004). Understanding the Linux Kernel. (2nd ed.). O'Reilly.

The standard book for learning the internals of the Linux kernel. Excellent documentation and snippet codes for easier understanding ofcode.

• 3. Michael Beck, Harald Bohme, Mirko Dziadzka, & Robert Magnus. (January 2003). Linux Kernel Programming. (3rd ed.). Addison Wesley.

The book explains the internals of Linux 2.4 and covers topics such asprocess scheduling, IPC, memory managment, file systems, device drivers, and multiprocessing.

GNU/Linux Administration

There are plenty of books that can teach you to install and configure GNU/Linux and setup services. I found the following books very useful:

• 1. Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Scott Seebass, & Trent R. Hein. (August 2000). UNIX System Administration Handbook. (3rd ed.). Prentice Hall.

An excellent book to get you started on *nix system administration. Highly recommended for beginners. A very useful reference book.

• 2. Steve Shah. (2001). Linux Administration - A Beginner's Guide. (2nd ed.). Osborne/McGraw-Hill.

The book covers installation, configuration and system administrationof GNU/Linux. It also has information on managing files, DNS, FTP,Apache, sendmail, Samba, and other services.

• 3. Matt Welsh, Matthias Kalle Dalheimer, Lar Kaufman. (August 1, 1999). Running Linux. (3rd ed.). O'Reilly.

An excellent book on introduction to GNU/Linux. If you want to get started on GNU/Linux this book is a must have.

Embedded

• 1. Karim Yaghmour. (April, 2003). Building Embedded Linux Systems. (1st ed.). O'Reilly.

I entered the world of embedded systems with this book. Karim's book taught me about embedded systems and how the Linux kernel can be built to various architectures along with GNU packages.

• 2. P. Raghavan, Amol Lad, and Sriram Neelakandan. (December, 2005). Embedded Linux System Design and Development. Auerbach.

A good introductory book on embedded GNU/Linux. It covers important basic concepts.