Review by Billy Barron, Tek-Tools

"Advanced Linux Programming" (New Riders; ISBN 0-7357-1043-0) by CodeSourcery starts off odd by having a company name instead of an author's name. When New Riders approached me about doing a book review for them, I picked this book because I thought I would soon be porting our product to Linux. That got delay a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and get the review done however.

The book primarily deals with Linux system programming in C. Before getting down to the nitty-gritty, it starts off by covering emacs, gcc, make, gdb, and good programming practices. Chapter 3 starts the real meat of the book.

The rest of the book divides Linux programming into parts such as processes, threads, interprocess communication, devices, the proc file system, other system calls, inline assembly, and security. It ends with a sample application and then some appendices.

The style of the book is that the coverage gets very detailed very fast. It is best suited to the mid-level to advanced programming who can pick things quickly and wants as much material as possible in a book. This fits my style of learning very well. However, I think that beginning programmers or those who like verbose descriptions will not be happy with the book.

An example of this is the threads chapter which manages to cover all the basics, synchronization, critical sections and advanced topic like cancellation in 34 pages. These 34 pages have a ton of example programs in them as well.

In conclusion, I think this is a good book for some trying to learn advanced linux programming. I would recommend it to the advanced programmer.