Tag Archives: UNIX-HATERS

Review: The UNIX-HATERS handbook

Note: I have stopped releasing my book reviews on this blog, as I want to put it on a more technical track. But since this is a technical book, I’ll post this review anyway.

The UNIX-Haters HandbookThe UNIX-Haters Handbook by Simson Garfinkel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was, among other things, a good history lesson. I learned more about the history of UNIX and computers / computer science from this book than in the past three years of studying computer science. It also made me aware of some rather horrible design choices in both the old UNIXes and the modern Linux, to some extent.

The hating on UNIX going on in this book is written in a highly amusing way, and I found myself chuckling about finding the things that annoy me today in this book from 1994, almost 20 years ago. Appearently, no one was interested in fixing inconsistencies between programs, yet another proof of the theory that, by releasing a program, you make a temporary design choice into a standard (although this still does not explain the discrepancies between git commit -S and git tag -s, if you know what I mean).

All in all, I would recommend this book to people interested in the history of UNIX and bad design choices.

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