Chapter 1 is about the philosophy of the UNIX culture.
Chapter 2 is about the history of the UNIX culture.

The philosophy, or unwritten tradition of the UNIX culture is described in the first chapter.

The chapters summarize how the UNIX culture, built around free and open development was vital to the durability of UNIX (and its descendants), even after the civil wars of AT&T vs Berkeley and the war amonb different UNIX vendors. As the book says:

Quote:Today the UNIX community itself has taken control of the technology and marketing, and is rapidly and visibly solving UNIX's problems.

UNIX, either by its design or by the culture built around it, is responsible for several good stuff. Namely, the open-source and free software movements (which will be described in the second chapter); portable, composable and flexible software; the hacker culture (UNIX is fun to hack); and the Internet.

In the section “What Unix Gets Wrong” we see the old topics already covered at The UNIX HATERS Handbook: ”Unix files have no structure above byte level; file deletion is irrevocable; job control is botched; etc.” And also, the X Windowing System. As the book says, most of those flaws reflects UNIX's heritage as an operating system designed primarily for technical users.

The book then tries to describe the UNIX philosophy. First, by the words of Doug McIlroy, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson. Then, the author summarizes the phillosophy in seventeen rules, which are explained in details on the following sections.

(01-05-2021, 11:11 AM)venam Wrote: "Mechanism, not policy"

This is also what I get from the first chapter. The rules guide how to design a software, and the “mechanism not policy” (or “separate interfaces from engines”) maxim is present to most of them, along with the simplicity of interface, and the preservation of programmers' time and effort (both for the first programmer and for future programmers).

Quote:Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming
...
Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust.

That's a rule I should have known before. Some of my algorithms are unnecessarily complex because of unorganized data structures.

The second chapter is about the history of the UNIX culture, the Internet culture, the hacker movement and the open-source movement (with all of its factions).

(01-05-2021, 11:11 AM)venam Wrote: This reminds of of all the cheap boards that are getting sold today, these could be the new "personal devices" of tomorrow. Or to stay closer to reality: mobile phones.

I have never thought of that. I hope that turns out to be true in the future.