Book details of 'The Unix-haters handbook'

Title	The Unix-haters handbook
Author(s)	Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise &Steven Strassman
ISBN	1568842031
Language	English
Published	June 1994
Publisher	Hungry Minds, Inc

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Amazon.com info for The Unix-haters handbook

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virtualbookcase.com score: 4.7   Vote for this book

The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'The Unix-haters handbook':

Reviewer Koos van den Hout wrote:
The book that describes in every detail why Unix must die and picks on every possible flaw or makes a flaw out of a design choice. A funny read even if you completely disagree with the book.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Given the current book market, with titles and series such as " ___ for the Terminally Besotted," and "I Loathe and Despise ___," the casual browser could be forgiven for thinking this was an introductory, albeit sarcastic, guide to UNIX. It isn't. UNIX-HATERS is an electronic discussion list for frustrated UNIX users to sound off about their latest disaster. Properly understood, the title is highly accurate: this is a compilation of the best of UNIX-HATERS postings, organized and with a supporting structure. It's funny, in both senses of the word. The book contains a lot of very humorous material. Much of it would be more amusing to the technically literate, but the narrative framework provides good explanations. The contemptuous and even vitriolic tone, however, gives the reader a feeling of tension and unease. For those familiar with UNIX, the book could provide some very handy tips, though primarily for various shells rather than the OS itself. It forms a kind of easter egg hunt for UNIX bugs and foibles; a bad-tempered "insider's guide" or "Undocumented UNIX". (One of the running themes is the inadequacy of UNIX documentation.) Dennis Ritchie wrote an "Anti-Foreword" for the book, in which he states that the authors "claim to seek progress, but ... succeed mainly in whining." This is a precise description of the book. The work could not be used for further OS development: the complaints point out not design flaws, but bugs in the implementation of an experimental system with distributed authorship; a commercial foster-child whose copyright has become an embarrassment. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994
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