The Balkanization of UNIX

The fact is, we shouldn't need this book. It is sad to see how many variants of UNIX are out there. This book covers converting programs that were developed and running on three of the major UNIX variants out there, Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, over to Linux. Such conversion entails not only fixing things that the compiler will complain about, like missing includes, incompatible system calls, etc., and also covers the more subtle incompatibilities, which might mean the program in question runs but crashes an hour later. It is an interesting reference work, and goes into great detail about trouble spots and such. I really hope that I won't see a similar book come out later, which covers converting programs written for several distinct variants of Linux so that they work on the next great OS. We should work together to make sure that such a balkanization does not occur.

Other Reviews

• must-have for Unix/Linux developer
• The Balkanization of UNIX
• A very valuable and comprehensive guidebook
• lots of gritty details