Immortality

Raymond GA Cote

4.4BSD-LITE O'Reilly & Associates, ISBN 1-56592-082-1, $150

BSD Unix is one of the best-known, most widely distributed, and most-revised versions of public domain Unix. Produced in the 1970s by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California at Berkeley, it has been distributed to and modified by educational communities worldwide. Last year, UC-Berkeley stated it would no longer provide maintenance and upgrades for it following the last release, 4.4BSD.

However, BSD Unix is too good a resource to throw away. It is a rich source of both reusable source code and overall system architecture that can be mined for years to come. O'Reilly & Associates has released a CD-ROM of 4.4BSD sources and the full five-volume set of accompanying documentation--System Manager's Manual, Programmer's Reference, User's Reference, Programmer's Supplementary Documents, and User's Supplementary Documents.

The usefulness of 4.4BSD is not limited to Unix aficionados. It contains a wealth of information for all professional programmers--no matter what your programming platform. At the very least, it contains reams of reusable source code for implementing operating systems, networking, file sharing, and security (i.e., Kerberos), not to mention a large number of utility programs and languages (e.g., AWK, C, C++, Pascal, and Perl).

Equally as important as the source code is the accompanying documentation. O'Reilly & Associates has taken the effort to provide these in printed form for easy reference. This is particularly important for the two Supplementary Documents volumes, which contain original documentation from many of the most important designers of Unix and its supplementary utilities. These volumes provide the designer's own view of the system architecture. It is here that the system archite cture that influenced a generation of programmers comes to life.