Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Linux Development Platform

Posted by timothy on from the robust-but-grainy dept.

honestpuck writes "Back before the advent of Mac OS X, my favourite (and for many years, only) development environment was one variety of Unix or another. The nicest thing about Unix was that the development environment stayed pretty much the same regardless of the variety; this stayed the same with the introduction of Linux." Honestpuck examines how true this still is (as well how accurate the chosen title is) in his review of Prentice Hall's The Linux Development Platform, below. The Linux Development Platform author Rafeeq Ur Rehman and Christopher Paul pages 320 publisher Prentice Hall PTR rating 7 reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 0130091154 summary Good guide to developer tools

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.

9 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. If you're interested in GNU dev tools... by tcopeland · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...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
    1. Re:If you're interested in GNU dev tools... by pete-classic · · Score: 5, Informative

      Or you could even patronize the GNU Press. Canonical documentation, and the money goes back to the fine folks that brought us the Free Software in question.

      -Peter

    2. Re:If you're interested in GNU dev tools... by ArchAngelQ · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I'll second this, with one note on it's quality. It really goes off on tangents with some very complex lexx and yacc code, which, not being that level of a system programmer, felt very hard to wade through. Not only that, but it felt as though it was there just to pad the book's length, as an included cd with the program's source would have been much more useful, rather than having the code, in full, in the book. It's not as if I can run gcc (or configure.sh) on the book.

      That out of the way, the coverage of the actual material, where it is covered, is excelent, absolutely as detailed as it needs to get, which is very. It's a complex topic, but one that will serve you well if you plan on building projects, rather than just contributing code, and even then, if there are new requirements you add to a project, knowing these tools is very handy.

  2. It's the little things... by Space+cowboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ... like glib, gnet, gtk+ (hah! little!) but you know what I mean - these were things that people needed, so they wrote. We all benefit, and so does linux and unix.

    I guess one of the strengths of the unix development model is that my SGI and Sun boxes have all the linux libraries on them, and I don't think that's at all strange...

    Unix (before linux became mainstream) didn't have as much work in the class libraries (which like it or loath it, VC++ provided quite well).... Now it does.

    Simon

    --
    Physicists get Hadrons!
  3. Real programmers... by Lodragandraoidh · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Give me diff, patch, CVS or RCS, make and emacs and I am a happy camper.

    Every year I have some yahoo come in and say how one IDE can do this, that, and the other thing - the best thing since sliced bread. Of course bells and whistles do not an IDE make (I would have said 'make an IDE', but, then I would be a liar on two counts).

    Emacs is fully extensible, and interfaces with all of the tools above. Additionally, I can run it over a telnet/ssh connection with ease (I don't use the mouse very much for two reasons; 1, I keep the keystrokes in my head for when I do need to use a telnet session, and 2, I have gotten to the point where I can do things faster using the keyboard than a mouse and keyboard combo in emacs.

    I even do my primary editing on my windoze box using emacs, and am 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.

    --

    Lodragan Draoidh
    The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
    1. Re:Real programmers... by pclminion · · Score: 4, Informative

      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...

  4. OT: Real programmers... by deadlinegrunt · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  5. Programming wiht GNU Software by ziggyboy · · Score: 5, Informative
    You guys might also want to check out the O'Reilly's "Programming with GNU Software" by Mike Loukides and Andy Oram. It seems the content is pretty much the same, and may even be a more appropriate title than "The Linux Development Platform." It includes chapters on: free softwre, intro to Unix, editing source code with emacs, compiling and linking with gcc, libraries, debuggging, make, rcs and program timings. Here's the O'Reilly page on the book.

    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.

  6. Re:Valuable tome by Otter · · Score: 5, Funny

    I should hope not! What if all those jobs writing software for free get outsourced to India? What will that do to our economy?

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...