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Unix-Haters Handbook Available Online
prostoalex writes "The Unix-Haters Handbook, publication year 1994, is now available online for free as a single PDF file. Apparently some suburban Seattle company has agreed to host this 3.5MB file on its servers. The anti-foreword is written by no other but Dennis Ritchie, who proclaims: 'Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But
it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.'" This is what should happen to more out-of-print books.
This might be on Microsoft's servers, but it's in Daniel Weise's private webspace (he being one of the three authors). No, this is not an unsubtle attempt at pro-windows propaganda.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
(I know, 'cause I sent in the note which it listed there ;)
.tex source (which one may not process save under specific circumstances) for _The TeXBook_ and _The METAFONT Book_ by Dr. Donald E. Knuth). Books of interest include:
That's, http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/ for those who aren't familiar with this wonderful site.
It lists a number of other out-of-print books which're of interest to geeks (and some which are in print such as the
_Unix Text Processing_
Norman Walsh's _Making TeX Work_ (which is on Sourceforge)
Eckel's book on programming Java
and for those with kids, _The Great Logo Adventure_
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Dennis Ritchie himself uses Windows NT...
Seriously, Simson Garfinkel is now a student, and as such is entering his way cool program sBook (see http://www.sbook5.com for downloads for Mac OS X and Windows---sadly the NeXTstep version isn't given away or maintained any longer, the Windows port is done w/ an older version of the QT library and won't work w/ Pen Services for Windows, crashes) in Apple's Developer's Contest this year.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
http://www.uktsupport.co.uk/humour/msoft.htm
In case it does get slashdotted, there is a mirror at www.cyruslabs.com/unix-haters/
It even has an HTML converted version for all of us that hate PDF's.
It's Steve Strassman (a.k.a. Strass), found here.
When Apple Dylan was cancelled, Dr Strassman went to work on online gaming. I exchanged one or two emails with him around that time, bemoaning the demise of that project (I still consider Dylan to be one of the best languages around). One of my friend at UCLA (Hi Scott !) used to know Steve from high-school.
I bought the Unix-Haters handbook then and agree with much of the spirit, despite the details being sometimes dated or missing the whole picture (probably on purpose). Despite that I work on Unix (and run OS X / FreeBSD / OpenBSD / Linux at home) and I prefer it to the alternatives I've seen so far.
It is amazing how much training it takes in UNIX to do something simple in Windows.
It is amazing how much work it takes in Windows to do something simple in Unix. For example, renaming a few hundred files in a directory.
(Oh, and your example, 'grep -r "text" *') Takes no more training under Unix than instructing someone where to click to find the "find" tool. Yes, someone might be able to stumble upon it if they click around enough, but most users can't or won't do it - they just assume it's too hard.
X-Windows is what first made me question UNIX's superiority
Yeah, me too, until I understood how much more powerful it is.
Motif was one of the worst in my life.
Motif != X.
Thats because the OS itself is barely more than an abstraction layer on the hardware. Unix was built as hundreds of command files that could pipe input and output between themselves to do complex jobs with small, "correct" pieces.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Full April fools prank: http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~susan/joke/c.htm
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This was a hoax. In fact, the C code given does not compile, and I don't see how it would compile under any reasonable compiler that would ever have been built. Even after wrapping the code in a main() function and adding appropriate functions, gcc still chokes on R=; (empty Rvalue) and the second for loop (no increment step). The comma-operator, the and-operator, the bitwise operators, hex constants: any language that gives you a lot of control over your data-structures and how you access them needs these one way or another. Sure, Ada is perhaps more readable. In fact, perl can be made a lot more readable than C, even though it, like about a dozen other languages, borrows its operators straight out of K&R, precedent included.
bash for windows?
check out Cygwin
Ken Thompson invented Unix so that he could continue playing spacewar.
You are confusing the presence of security features with security. VMS had plenty of security features, it just managed to be even less secure than UNIX at the time (a pretty amazing feat).
Could you elaborate on this? I was a VMS fan and system manager for a few years, and I've never heard these allegations.
It might behoove you to actually read the introduction to the book and the bios of the authors. The people who wrote it were not circa-2002 pro-Microsoft trolls; they were circa-1991 VMS and Multics refugees who as a rule knew more about operating system design and engineering than you'll ever learn.
Also, pointing out that idiotic mistakes such as "hidden" files have been perpetuated by newer operating systems does not negate the point that it was an idiotic mistake. (Quite the opposite, actually.)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
The MS link is broken now, but the pdf is also available here.