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Linux Programmer's Toolbox
Ravi writes "What does it take to start writing programs for Linux? Most people will guess a text editor, knowledge of a programming language, the compiler and libraries of that language. Ask a professional programmer and he will differ with you. Insisting that while those things can help get you started, other things come into play in writing efficient programs such as, a debugger, memory profiler tools and above all a good understanding of the inner working of the Linux kernel and its processes." Read below for the rest of Ravi's review.
Linux Programmer's Toolbox
author
John Fusco
pages
622
publisher
Prentice Hall
rating
9
reviewer
Ravi
ISBN
0132198576
summary
Teaches you the use of tools which help you become a better Linux programmer
The book The Linux Programmer's Toolbox by John Fusco is a storehouse of knowledge, which aims to make the average Linux/Windows programmer aware of the tools at his disposal, that can help him write better programs for Linux. The book is divided into 10 distinct chapters with the first 4 chapters describing various ways of boosting ones productivity while writing code.
In the very first chapter titled "Downloading and Installing Opensource tools", he talks about the different archive formats commonly used in Linux, various package managers such as Debian's own apt-get, Red Hat's Yum and how to properly authenticate the packages you download to ensure that they are not tampered with.
The second chapter deals with building tools from source. Here apart from describing the actual steps involved in compiling the sources, the author also delves into explaining the concept behind the MakeFile, the common variables used in implicit rules and so on. In this chapter one also gets to acquire an understanding of the tools used to create projects as well as examine how these tools work together in the build process.
The book has a chapter exclusively devoted to explaining ways of ambulating through the myriad of documents; tools such as man, info, as well as some of the not so obvious ones. One thing I like about this particular chapter is how the author has provided tables which list a number of recommended manual pages with a short description of each of them.
Linux doesn't have a comprehensive IDE on the lines of Microsoft Visual Studio to develop programs — at least not yet. Most Linux programming gurus are perfectly at home with coding using their favorite text editor. Any book of this stature would be incomplete without a mention of the different editors available for coding in Linux and their pros and cons. The 4th chapter of this book introduces the different editors including Vim and Emacs. There are numerous tips in this chapter to make writing code more efficient, productive and a pleasant experience for the average Linux programmer. As a Vi enthusiast, I couldn't help but admire how one can convert Vim editor to work as a code browser with the help of Ctags which is explained in detail.
The fifth chapter titled "What every developer should know about the kernel" is a turning point in the book and gives a comprehensive understanding of the working of the Linux kernel. It is by far the largest chapter — with nearly 100 pages devoted to this topic. In this chapter the author talks in lucid detail about the different modes in Linux, the process scheduler, device drivers, the I/O scheduler and the memory management in user space, understanding all of which is instrumental in writing better programs for Linux.
The next two chapters deal with Linux processes and the communication between processes. Here one gets to know more about the technical vagaries related to processes such as forking, cloning, process synchronization and the basics of inter process communication. The author has introduced several APIs and basic examples of each.
In the 8th chapter, the author introduces many tools that are installed by default in most Linux distributions which aid in debugging communication between processes. The tools include (but are not limited to) lsof, fuser, stat, hexdump, strace and so on. Each tool is accompanied by its usage and its output with a short discussion of the output.
In the 9th chapter titled "Performance Tuning", one gets to know more about fine tuning a Linux program. Here the author explains the factors affecting system performance as well as the tools for finding system performance issues.
Finally, the last chapter of the book explores some of the most common debugging tools and techniques for Linux. More specifically, I found the discussion on the use of GNU debugger quite informative.
At the end of each of the 10 chapters in the book, the author has provided a short synopsis of the tools that are used. Also many additional online resources have been listed where one can acquire more knowledge about the topic being covered. Throughout the book, noteworthy sections have been highlighted in dark background which makes it quite eye catching and also easy for quick reference.
The book is written with a slant towards the C language especially when depicting the examples in the latter half of the book, which can be understood considering that the bulk of the Linux kernel has been written using C.
Most programmers with a Windows background will be forced to make a paradigm shift while embarking to program for Linux. While the Windows programmers are used to taking deceptive comfort within the cozy confines of a Visual IDE, when they make the shift to write Linux programs, they are suddenly faced with the hard facts of programming as it really is. This book could be an ideal companion for this set of programmers who wish to lessen their learning curve and make programming for Linux a much more pleasurable experience.
I found this book to be an excellent resource for programmers (not necessarily only those with a Windows background) who wish to develop programs for Linux.
Ravi Kumar is a Linux enthusiast who maintains a blog related to Linux, Open Source and Free Software at linuxhelp.blogspot.com.
You can purchase Linux Programmer's Toolbox from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The book The Linux Programmer's Toolbox by John Fusco is a storehouse of knowledge, which aims to make the average Linux/Windows programmer aware of the tools at his disposal, that can help him write better programs for Linux. The book is divided into 10 distinct chapters with the first 4 chapters describing various ways of boosting ones productivity while writing code.
In the very first chapter titled "Downloading and Installing Opensource tools", he talks about the different archive formats commonly used in Linux, various package managers such as Debian's own apt-get, Red Hat's Yum and how to properly authenticate the packages you download to ensure that they are not tampered with.
The second chapter deals with building tools from source. Here apart from describing the actual steps involved in compiling the sources, the author also delves into explaining the concept behind the MakeFile, the common variables used in implicit rules and so on. In this chapter one also gets to acquire an understanding of the tools used to create projects as well as examine how these tools work together in the build process.
The book has a chapter exclusively devoted to explaining ways of ambulating through the myriad of documents; tools such as man, info, as well as some of the not so obvious ones. One thing I like about this particular chapter is how the author has provided tables which list a number of recommended manual pages with a short description of each of them.
Linux doesn't have a comprehensive IDE on the lines of Microsoft Visual Studio to develop programs — at least not yet. Most Linux programming gurus are perfectly at home with coding using their favorite text editor. Any book of this stature would be incomplete without a mention of the different editors available for coding in Linux and their pros and cons. The 4th chapter of this book introduces the different editors including Vim and Emacs. There are numerous tips in this chapter to make writing code more efficient, productive and a pleasant experience for the average Linux programmer. As a Vi enthusiast, I couldn't help but admire how one can convert Vim editor to work as a code browser with the help of Ctags which is explained in detail.
The fifth chapter titled "What every developer should know about the kernel" is a turning point in the book and gives a comprehensive understanding of the working of the Linux kernel. It is by far the largest chapter — with nearly 100 pages devoted to this topic. In this chapter the author talks in lucid detail about the different modes in Linux, the process scheduler, device drivers, the I/O scheduler and the memory management in user space, understanding all of which is instrumental in writing better programs for Linux.
The next two chapters deal with Linux processes and the communication between processes. Here one gets to know more about the technical vagaries related to processes such as forking, cloning, process synchronization and the basics of inter process communication. The author has introduced several APIs and basic examples of each.
In the 8th chapter, the author introduces many tools that are installed by default in most Linux distributions which aid in debugging communication between processes. The tools include (but are not limited to) lsof, fuser, stat, hexdump, strace and so on. Each tool is accompanied by its usage and its output with a short discussion of the output.
In the 9th chapter titled "Performance Tuning", one gets to know more about fine tuning a Linux program. Here the author explains the factors affecting system performance as well as the tools for finding system performance issues.
Finally, the last chapter of the book explores some of the most common debugging tools and techniques for Linux. More specifically, I found the discussion on the use of GNU debugger quite informative.
At the end of each of the 10 chapters in the book, the author has provided a short synopsis of the tools that are used. Also many additional online resources have been listed where one can acquire more knowledge about the topic being covered. Throughout the book, noteworthy sections have been highlighted in dark background which makes it quite eye catching and also easy for quick reference.
The book is written with a slant towards the C language especially when depicting the examples in the latter half of the book, which can be understood considering that the bulk of the Linux kernel has been written using C.
Most programmers with a Windows background will be forced to make a paradigm shift while embarking to program for Linux. While the Windows programmers are used to taking deceptive comfort within the cozy confines of a Visual IDE, when they make the shift to write Linux programs, they are suddenly faced with the hard facts of programming as it really is. This book could be an ideal companion for this set of programmers who wish to lessen their learning curve and make programming for Linux a much more pleasurable experience.
I found this book to be an excellent resource for programmers (not necessarily only those with a Windows background) who wish to develop programs for Linux.
Ravi Kumar is a Linux enthusiast who maintains a blog related to Linux, Open Source and Free Software at linuxhelp.blogspot.com.
You can purchase Linux Programmer's Toolbox from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
If you want to move into the murky world of C/C++ development these are IMHO the basic tools:
There are many more tools but those are good start. It also helps to have a thick skin, getting to know which library does what, being persistent and making heavy use of search engines rather than posting every problem to mailing lists and newsgroups. Also remember that a lot of enterprise grade software can be had for free under various conditions. Just to name two examples... OS X actually ships with the Xcode development suite and Oracle offers various developer suites as well as many of it's products for download under a development license if you sign up for an Oracle account.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil"
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
A statement like "[VIM] just makes the entire system seem antiquated and stupid" is foppish and itself ignorant. If text (and keyboard input) is antiquated, then I guess we should all get out of the programming game. Maybe do a little LabVIEW and then commit mass suicide.
In a way, [G]VI[M] and EMACS each represent a club. Clubs of people who took the temporary productivity hit to learn a difficult tool (and possibly put in extra hours to still make the deadline) with some promise of greater productivity in the end.
Is it a false promise? Maybe. There may be a little elitist ego in there, too, but I'd like to think that many who have learned those tools are people willing to put in effort for overall efficiency, and it seems to me to have been beneficial.
Each time I've coded a different "language" (Verilog, C, C++, javascript, Python, Magic VLSI text files, shell, SVG, POV-Ray, bill-of-materials files, SPICE models, config files, etc.) VIM has been there for me, equally handy and powerful. But it didn't look as pretty as Visual Studio, so I guess I shouldn't bother to tell anyone about it. And remember, these are not necessarily tools for a first-time programmer, but for a first-time Linux programmer.
I found that the C++ development was difficult if the project size was too large. The "build automatically" feature was hopeless if it was turned on. It fires every time you save a file and usually didn't finish before the next save if you were doing tweaks. Autocompletion got to be extremely slow as the symbol tables increased, though that might have been partially to the templates I was using. Without those features, a lot of the appeal for Eclipse went away for me.
The caveats are that I was using the gcj compiled version that came with FC4, and was using this when FC4 was current. It may have gotten better, but C++ is such a complicated language there may still be issues.
Kdevelop is very close to VS in features, and much better than Eclipse for anything other than Java. I have done lots of development in C++, PHP, and Python using kdevelop.
It's hard to tell if it's kdevelop itself that's better, or if I'm comparing Qt with MFC, but for me at least, developing in kdevelop is several times more productive than in Visual Studio.
Besides, the fact that Qt is now very well integrated with Python brings even more productivity because we do not need to use C++ for GUI development. I don't know how well Visual Studio handles GUI development in Python, but I certainly do not miss the old days when I did develop for Windows using MFC and C++. Even better, there is PyQt for Windows, so you can do multiplatform development in kdevelop.
In my experience, the most productive platform for code development is a kubuntu machine with kdevelop creating Python code with Qt, using C libraries where needed. For integrating C libraries in Python I use swig.