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The Linux Development Platform
The Linux Development Platform might be better titled "The GNU Development Platform" since almost all of the tools discussed come from the FSF, and those that don't are nevertheless open source; as a result they will run on almost any Unix variety. You know that the 'Linux' in the title is almost just a marketing ploy, but we will forgive Prentice Hall and the authors. Certainly more people will buy this book to learn about using these tools under Linux than under any other *nix variety.
The book starts with a short chapter on software development per se before getting down to the nuts and bolts. It starts in the obvious spot, with editors, and quickly covers choosing an editor before taking a brief look at Emacs, Jed and VIM. The rest of the book is devoted to much less contentious issues.
As a whole, the text provides a good grounding in using gcc, make, CVS and GDB, with enough extra information on smaller tools and larger issues (such as cross-platform and embedded systems) that you will not need more than this book and, perhaps, the man pages to understand and use these tools. Of course others, have written entire volumes on each of these topics, but for most of us this book will provide the information we need.
The Linux Development Platform comes with a CD containing the source for a fair number of the tools discussed, so you can build any tools which happen to be missing on your platform, though some of the included apps are, of course, already a version or two behind.
The writing is mixed in quality: while never bad, it has a slightly heavy, technical feel to it, often a bit wordy or cumbersome. This rarely gets in the way of understanding, but it does slow you down. The topic coverage is good, moving from a beginner level right through to a good understanding of each tool discussed. More importantly, all the tools you will need are covered.
I imagine this would make an excellent companion text for any programming course: note that it doesn't provide details on any programming language, but covers everything else you need to know regarding the development tools. It is thinnest in the discussion of editors, really only giving a brief overview of each. I cannot really see this as a fault since detailed coverage really would take a separate book, and this quick look is better than pretending to cover the topic well and failing. The other possible weakness is that there is almost no coverage of general Linux usage, so calling the book The Linux Development Platform is a bit of a misnomer -- it is really devoted to the tools available for development, not the underlying operating system at all. Once again, I feel that this lack is not serious; most buyers should know enough about the operating system and any attempt to cover it adequately would have swelled the size and cost of the book.
Prentice Hall PTR have a site for the book with a Table of Contents or you can see the whole book in HTML format at FAQs.org.
I would recommend this book to anyone who would like a good, general introduction to developing software on a Unix platform. Though it's not a cheap book, it is a good one. It was certainly a relief for me to find a good book in Prentice Hall's 'Bruce Peren Open Source Series' after a couple of flawed ones.
You can purchase The Linux Development Platform from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to submit a review for consideration, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
...you might also want to get GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool. It gives a pretty good overview of the standard GNU C/C++ source building tools.
It also has a couple of handy little chapters in there on doing some basic stuff, like how to build and load a shared object library. Not rocket science, but it's nice to have it explained clearly.
The Army reading list
> he is using is own REF ID to make some money
No. The REF refers to the book ID. A referral link will have a user name embedded with a "-20" after it, as in "myamazonwhoringname-20". This link is clean.
Don't believe me? Try searching from Amazon yourself, and tell me the URL you get back. It's good to do some rudimentary research before shooting off at the mouth.
Having said that, it's still spam taking up valuable space on Slashdot.
Kylix / C++ BuilderX
Why does the kernel go through stable and then unstable forks? Can't it always be a stable build, like with Windows?
in the process of writing python language equivalents to the most common unix command line utilities (already completed 'grep.py' - then want: make, diff, patch and other tools unavailable on the windows command line) as a learning process
I understand the "learning process" part but have you heard of MSYS?
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
You're aware of Cygwin which provides all the GNU tools, compilers, linkers, editors, etc, even the standard UNIX APIs, all ported to Windows? I understand that you want to learn, but there are other UNIX emulation projects out there, and they took person-decades to write. You're just one guy...
Many Linux programming books actually already contain most of the content of these kind of books including Wrox's "Beginning Linux Programming" by Richard Stones and Neil Matthew. You can find the book's webpage here. A very good text to get you started in Unix programming.
These kinds of books are great to inspire a population of hobbiests to write new and interesting programs (just one of a set of reader types). However, without a good grasp of the prior solutions to most technology issues, one is bound to spend a lot of time experimenting to create something that already exists.
With all the tools OS/GNU and such, there should be strong emphasis on the myriad of projects already out there. Sadly, this amount of information may be too dynamic or large for printed matter. A lot of great minds are all designing bad MP3 players, for example, when the algorithm and code is pretty much commoditized.
Eh. Don't get me wrong, I'm not to stifle innovation in existing concepts, but most subjects are vastly deeper than what a home-hobbiest is going to know when typing up their first few projects.