Mike Gancarz's book
The UNIX Philosophy (Digital Press, 1995) describes many of the ideas and conventions that have made
unix a great sytem. It starts with a short run down of the history, quickly getting to the meat of things, discussion of the major ideas of
Unixdom and illustrations of why they are such good ideas. While many of the ideas may seem relatively obvious to anyone who's worked with the system before, it makes an excellent introduction to the traditions of the Unix world, as well as an excelent bit of
advocacy for why the Unix way is the
Right Way.
Listed in the first chapter, the following nine points are the key
tenets:
- Small is beautiful
- Make each program do one thing
- Build a prototype as soon as possible
- Choose portability over efficiency
- Store numerical data in flat ASCII files
- Use software leverage to your advantage
- Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability
- Avoid captive user interfaces
- Make every program a filter
...and the ten lesser points:
- Allow the user to tailor the environment:
- Make operating system kernels small and lightweight:
- Use lower case and keep it short
- Save trees
- Silence is golden
- Think parallel
- The sum of the parts is greater than the whole
- Look for the 90 percent solution
- Worse is better
- Think hierarchiacally