| Author | Title | Publisher | ISBN | Review |
| Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall | Beej's Guide to Network Programming | Great step-by-step guide to socket programming. Covers all important aspects and common pitfalls. | ||
| Chip Morningstar | How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure | A critical look at modern literary criticism from an engineer's point of view. | ||
| Andrew S. Tanenbaum | Modern Operating Systems, Second Edition | Prentice Hall, 2001 | ISBN: 0-13-092641-8 | The most common textbook on operating systems and their underlying concepts. Very smooth read, every what comes with corresponding whys. I especially recommend the chapter on security. It covers all the basics without the nowadays all too common worship of magic out-of-the box security "solutions" that are applied without much (if any!) thought. If you intend to build secure software/a secure operating system read it before blindly adding everything in reach that somebody slapped a "security" label on. Another chapter worthy of praise is the comprehensive bibliography that contains a plethora of (commented!) pointers to further reading. |
| Marc Slemko | Path MTU Discovery and Filtering ICMP | Comprehensive article on why generally filtering ICMP (way too common nowadays) causes problems by breaking path MTU discovery. Read this if you believe that setting your packet filter to drop any ICMP traffic accomplishes anything useful. For it simply doesn't (apart from some edge cases, but you need a thorough understanding of the subject to determine what constitutes one of these). | ||
| Kay A. Robbins, Steven Robbins | Practical UNIX Programming | Prentice Hall, 1996 | ISBN: 0-13-443706-3 | Good reference on Unix systems programming. Covers a lot more details than The UNIX Programming Environment. I don't particularily like the networking section, though. The authors chose to write a wrapper library around the common socket syscalls. While this library renders network programming a lot less tedious it has the disadvantage of not being available everywhere you might need it, as the authors admit themselves: "UICI is not part of any UNIX standard[...]" (p. 437). I wouldn't mind it all that much if they'd properly introduce socket programming before introducing their wrapper library, but they don't. Apart from that omission the book is a rock solid reference on Unix systems programming. |
| Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, Jon Orwant | Programming Perl, 3rd Edition | O'Reilly, 2000 | ISBN: 0-596-00027-8 | The definitive reference on Perl. Comprehensive, example-rich introduction to Perl's features plus reference section (it is mostly identical with the perldoc(1) online documentation, though). Probably all the literature on Perl you'll ever need. |
| Bruce Schneier | Refuse to be terrorized | A very insightful article on the goals of terrorism and what we can do to keep terrorists from reaching them. | ||
| Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie | The C Programming Language, Second Edition | Prentice Hall, 1988 | ISBN: 0-13-110370-9 | Everything you need to learn the C programming language plus some systems programming. Compact, no-nonsense writing style. The definitive reference on C. |
| Thomas Scoville | The Elements Of Style: UNIX As Literature | Very refreshing article on Unix culture. Read it! | ||
| Brian W. Kernighan, Rob Pike | The UNIX Programming Environment | Prentice Hall, 1984 | ISBN: 0-13-937699-2 | A solid introduction to Unix systems programming. Due to its age some topics (such as networking) are not covered, otherwise you get a thorough overview of a Unix system's interfaces and facilities. Highly recommended. |
