Working with Unix Processes

Paperback: 134 pages
Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf (May 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: n/a
ISBN-13: n/a

07/26/2012 · No Responses

Take advantage of system programming techniques without toiling away in C. If you program for the web, you might be missing some fundamentals in the name of getting stuff working. Now you can fill that gap. In Working With Unix Processes, you’ll reuse decades of battle-tested, highly optimized, and proven techniques to put your system to work for you.

In Working With Unix Processes you’ll learn simple, powerful techniques that can help you write your own servers and debug your full stack when things go awry. The techniques and methods that give you primitives for concurrency, daemons, spawning processes, and signals transcend programming languages and have been used unchanged for decades. You can bet they’ll be relied upon for years to come.

The book takes an incremental approach. It begins with the very basics of Unix processes and system calls and builds all the way up to writing daemon processes and preforking servers. Once you’ve worked through the basics you’ll dive into two real-world projects, Unicorn and Resque, that make use of Unix processes.

This is not a book about Unix system administration or shell programming. This book covers the concepts and techniques that underlie tools like shells, servers, and daemons. It will help you understand the building blocks that these tools are built on.

What You Need:
The book assumes you’re running on a Unix-like operating system (Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, etc. Pretty much anything besides Windows). Code samples in the book are written for Ruby 1.9.x and assume a working knowledge of Ruby.