The Art of Unix Programming, reformatted Written on 15 Jan 2019

tl;dr: I reformatted Eric S. Raymond’s The Art of Unix Programming for readability; read it here.

I recently wanted to look up a quote for an article I was writing, and was fairly sure I had read it in The Art of Unix Programming. Eric S. Raymond (esr) has kindly published it online but it’s difficult to search as it’s distributed over many different pages, and the formatting is not exactly conducive for readability.

I wget --mirror ’d it to my drive, and started out with a simple script to join everything to a single page, but eventually ended up rewriting a lot of the HTML from crappy 2003 docbook-generated tagsoup to more modern standards, and I slapped on some CSS to make it more readable.

The results are fairly nice, and it should work well in any version of any browser.

The HTML could be simplified further, but dealing with 360k lines of ill-formatted HTML is not exactly my idea of fun, so this will have to do.

The entire page is self-contained. You can save it to your laptop or mobile phone and read it on a plane or whatnot.

Why spend so much work on an IT book from 2003? I think a substantial part of the book still applies very much today, for all programmers (not just Unix programmers). For example the Basics of the Unix Philosophy was good advice in 1972, is still good advice in 2019, and will continue to be good advice well in to the future.

Other parts have aged less gracefully; for example “since 2000, practice has been moving toward use of XML-DocBook as a documentation interchange format” doesn’t really represent the current state of things, and the Data File Metaformats section mentions XML and INI but not JSON or YAML (as they weren’t invented until after the book was written)

I find this adds, rather than detracts. It makes for an interesting window in to past. The downside is that the uninitiated will have a bit of a hard time distinguishing between the good and outdated parts. As a rule of thumb: if it talks about abstract concepts, it probably still applies today. If it talks about specific software, it may be outdated.

I toyed with the idea of updating or annotating the text, but the license doesn’t allow derivative works, so that’s not going to happen. Perhaps I’ll email esr and ask nicely. Another project, for another weekend :-)