This is a useful book if you start programming on a UNIX platform. The book does not cover all you ever need to know for UNIX systems programming, but gives a basic knowledge on which to build. The back cover is misleading; 'This book builds on the skills and knowledge you already possess', because the book takes you by the hand and explains all fundamentals and UNIX commands. No user level UNIX level is required, e.g. in the chapter on regular expressions, all the rules to understand and create regular expressions are clearly explained.

The book consists of 27 chapters which all explain a small topic. The examples are written in C and a few in basic C++, which the author might have better avoided given poor coding practices. For every example program it is indicated how to compile and link the program. The program is explained and a few lines of output are given.

What is covered; The various file system constructs and their permissions, blocking and non-blocking IO, error reporting, file and record locking, file operations, directory management, temporary files, command line processing, string conversion functions, date and time facilities, user management, static and shared libraries, database library routines, signals, pipes and processes, pattern matching and regular expressions, message queues, semaphores, shared memory and memory-mapped files.

I was missing threads and mutexes, asynchronous IO, terminals, deamon processes. To conclude, a reasonable first read if you have little or no background in this subject.