Unix Descriptions and Programmer's Manuals

1. The Bell System Technical Journal, Volume 57 Number 6, Part 2, July-August 1978. AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. ISSN 0005-8580. A special issue devoted to Unix, by the creators of the system.

2. AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, Volume 63 Number 8, Part 2, October 1984. AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, USA. Another special issue devoted to Unix.

   These two volumes were republished as:

3. UNIX System Readings and Applications, Volume 1, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA, 1987. ISBN 0-13-938532-0.

4. UNIX System Readings and Applications, Volume 2, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, USA, 1987. ISBN 0-13-939845-7.

5. UNIX Time-sharing System: UNIX Programmers Manual, Seventh Edition, Volumes 1, 2A, 2B. Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., January 1979.

   These are the reference manuals (Volume 1), and descriptive papers (Volumes 2A and 2B) for the landmark Seventh Edition Unix system, the direct ancestor of all current commercial Unix systems.

   They were reprinted by Holt Rinehart & Winston, but are now long out-of-print. However, they are available online from Bell Labs in troff source, PDF, and PostScript formats. See http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan.

6. UNIX Research System: Programmer's Manual, Tenth Edition, Volume 1, AT&T Bell Laboratories, M.D. McIlroy and A.G. Hume editors, Holt Rinehart & Winston, New York, NY, USA, 1990. ISBN 0-03-047532-5.

7. UNIX Research System: Papers, Tenth Edition, Volume 2, AT&T Bell Laboratories, M.D. McIlroy and A.G. Hume editors, Holt Rinehart & Winston, New York, NY, USA, 1990. ISBN 0-03-047529-5.

   These are the manuals and papers for the Tenth Edition Unix system. Although this system was not used much outside of Bell Labs, many of the ideas from it and its predecessors were incorporated into various versions of System V. And the manuals make interesting reading, in any case.

8. 4.4BSD Manuals, Computing Systems Research Group, University of California at Berkeley. O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA, USA, 1994. ISBN: 1-56592-082-1. Out of print.

   The manuals for 4.4BSD.

9. Your Unix programmer's manual. One of the most instructive things you can do is read your manual from front to back.[1] (This is harder than it used to be, as Unix systems have grown.) It is easier to do if your Unix vendor makes printed copies of their documentation available. Otherwise, start with the Seventh Edition manual, and then read your local documentation as needed.

   [1] One summer, while working as a contract programmer, I spent my lunchtimes reading the manual for System III (yes, that long ago), from cover to cover. I don't know that I ever learned so much in so little time.

10. A Quarter Century of Unix, Peter H. Salus, Addison Wesley, Reading, MA, USA, 1994. ISBN: 0-201-54777-5.

    A delightful book that tells the history of Unix, from its inception up to the time the book was written. It reads like a good novel, except that it's all true!

11. The Unix Philosophy, Mike Gancarz, Digital Equipment Corp, USA, 1996. ISBN: 1-55558-123-4.

12. Plan 9: The Manuals, The Documents, The System, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Harcourt Brace and Company, Boston, MA, USA, 1995. ISBN: 0-03-017143-1 for the full set. ISBN: 0-03-01742-3 for just the manuals. See http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9/distrib.html.

    These volumes document and provide the system and source code for "Plan 9 From Bell Labs," the next-generation system done by the same people at Bell Labs who created Unix. It contains many interesting and exciting ideas. The set comes with a CD-ROM including full source code, or you can purchase just the manuals.