On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Always Learning centos@u62.u22.net wrote:
If you really want to appreciate the concepts, you should find a unix manual from the days before X was included. Back then there were 5 sections where 1 covered the command line programs, 2 covered system calls, 3 the standard C library, etc. It was small enough that you could read and mostly memorize it, especially section 1, in a few days. The thing to appreciate is that 30+ years later, even in cloned versions, those things were designed well enough that pretty much everything in there still continues to work.
Design is so important. Get it really right the first time and vast amounts of time and effort are saved. If I ever encounter a Unix book or manual, I'll certainly keep it to read.
There is plenty of documentation around now, but it is much, much harder to sort out the core tools from the cruft and specialty stuff now. If you understand what the fork() system call does, most of the rest of what unix-like systems do will generally make sense.