[TUHS] First book on Unix for general readership

markus schnalke meillo at marmaro.de
Sun Apr 5 01:05:26 AEST 2020


Hoi,

found on Wikipedia:

	As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb debugger
	and The UNIX System, the second book on the UNIX system,
	intended for a general readership.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_R._Bourne

Thus I now wonder what the first book on Unix, intended for a
general readership was.

Bourne's book was published 1983.

(``The UNIX Programming Environment'' was published 1984.)


Was it Banahan and Rutter's ``UNIX -- the Book''? It says 1982.

Could anyone share some background on that one? (The authors were
from Bradford University.)

I only have the German translation by Axel T. Schreiner, dated
1984. Haven't read the English original, but Schreiner's version
definitely is worth to read (if you speak German). He added lots
of footnotes, and it becomes apparent that he knows the system
better than the authors. ;-)


I'd like to get an understanding of the books in relation to each
other. How does the Banahan/Rutter book fit into the picture? Why
didn't Bell Labs write a user's book earlier? Were Bourne's and
Kernighan/Pike's books reactions to it?


meillo


More information about the TUHS mailing list