Unix-Haters Handbook Available Online 760
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.
Nothing to do with Microsoft... (Score:5, Informative)
Announced on ``The Online Books Page'' a while ago (Score:5, Informative)
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
Go Figure (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where are they now? (Score:3, Informative)
William
This one? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Go Figure (Score:3, Informative)
Eh? so what. SOme of us don't think of unix as a place to do gui, but instead as a place to do work ;)
Mirror (Score:4, Informative)
It even has an HTML converted version for all of us that hate PDF's.
Re:Where are they now? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:Some very good points... (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:Windows Hater Book, Entry 1 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:favorite part thus far - Unix & C were a pr (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Some times I've been bitty by unix: (Score:1, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:cryptic commands? (Score:5, Informative)
You kids amuse me. I worked on an AS/400. Command interface was WONDERFUL. Basic form was :
3 letter verb (e.g., MOV for move, CPY for copy, etc.) 3 letter object (e.g., PFM for physical file member, etc.)
Depending on the meaning of the command, you might have an optional second object type, or a single letter "adjective" (e.g., "A" for "attribute")
For example, to copy a file was CPYF, to copy a spool file was CPYSPLF, etc. Lots of times, just knowing what you had to do and the nature of the object you were working with was enough to guess the right command. And if you remembered a command but not the options, you typed in the command, hit PF4, and got a nice documented prompt. Much better than having to scroll through man pages.
I heven't touched one of these machines for many years, but I can still come up with all the basic commands on the spot. I now work more with UNIX, and still have a hard time remembering commands and argument ordering for many common tasks.
The AS/400 commands were developed by folks who saw what old 1970's mainframe commands were like and knew they had to improve on them (IEBGENER to copy a file? come on!). They knew what they had sucked, and that they had to improve on it. UNIX users, on the other hand, made a virtue out of necessity, and figured if someone else couldn't figure out their system, then they must not be smart enough to deserve to use it.
Simplicity is a virtue with UNIX. Consistency unfortunately isn't
Re:favorite part thus far - Unix & C were a pr (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Great read! (Score:1, Informative)
check out Cygwin [cygwin.com]
...and if you like this... (Score:2, Informative)
uhh... WRONG! (Score:2, Informative)
Ken Thompson invented Unix [lclark.edu] so that he could continue playing spacewar [mit.edu].
Re:so, why didn't you do something about it? (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Ahem (Score:3, Informative)
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.)
Mirror (Score:3, Informative)