So, venam gave the idea on IRC and some users agreed that it would be nice to start a book club. Every week we read a couple chapters from a book and then debrief and discuss them on the thread until it is done, then we move to another book.

I suggest we begin with The UNIX Programming Environment. It's a classic, it's freely available on the Internet Archive, and it was written by Kernighan himself.





The book has 9 chapters, an epilog and some appendices (one of them teaching how to use ed, the standard editor). It covers from shell scripting to C programming with UNIX system calls. It begins light, but reaches its apex on chapter 8 when we are supposed to use UNIX tools such as yacc(1) to write a language and a calculator (which has not survived as a UNIX tool, but exists on plan 9 with the name of hoc(1)).

The main challenge of the book is to adapt the old UNIX examples and K&R C code to the modern systems we have nowadays. We can discuss how this can be done, what changed, how changed, and what remains the same.

I think it is a good book that, although being old, is worth reading.

We can do the first two chapters in a week or two (they are short). And then one chapter per two weeks. We can finish the book in two to three months.

So, who is in?
Let's start the nixers' book club!
See you in a week to discuss the first chapters! (I'll bump this thread then)

Deadlines:

• Week 1 (November 21): Chapters 1 and 2.
  
• Week 2 (November 28): Chapters 3 and 4 (until page 114).
  
• Week 3 (December 05): Chapters 4 (remaining) and 5.
  
• Week 4 (December 12): Chapters 6 and 7.
  
• Week 5 (January 02): Chapter 8.
  
• Week 6: (January 10): Chapter 9 and Epilog.
  

These deadlines are predictions, we can change them depending on how we advance on the reading.