Things I have done since then, related:

1. started reading Tom Limoncelli’s very applicable Time Management for System Administrators
2. set up suspend to disk on my laptop using the uswsusp package
3. encrypted my swap partition using these handy instructions
4. encountered and worked around this bug in using cryptsetup

There’s always next year for National Novel Writing Month but the changes I’ve made instead seem more important to me.

Despite the age it’s still pertinent to developing in C or C++ in the Linux environment.  It does a decent job of covering the core concepts of different kinds of resources used by processes including threads.  Many code examples make the nitty gritty manifest and it has pointers to even more resources, including a site dedicated to the book.

The target audience of this book is purportedly primarily Windows developers who have decided to develop on Linux.  Right.  Because that happens.  But as it turns out, this book is well targeted for rusty Unix developers and dabblers like myself.

Who might like this book

• C coders who have somehow mysteriously failed to use this ‘looooo-nix’ thing
• Linux system administrators who can shrug off their sick dependency on webmin long enough to look at a command line
• Someone wanting to read about the innards of the Linux environment

Who might not like this book

• Windows users.  It contains no Wizards, bluescreens