2. Books on Culture, History, and Pragmatics

The New Hacker's Dictionary (Third Edition)

Raymond, Eric S.; MIT Press; 1996; ISBN 0-262-68092-0; 547pp.
See http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/book-home.tcl?isbn=0262680920.

Um, er. A guide to Internet culture. Lots of people like it. HTML at the Jargon File Resource Page.

A Quarter Century of Unix

Salus, Peter H.; Addison-Wesley; 1994; ISBN 0-201-54777-5; 256pp.
See http://www.awl-he.com/titles/13683.html

Linux is part of the Unix tradition. This book is an oral history of Unix -- how it originated, how it evolved, how it spread -- by the people who were there.

The Mythical Man Month (Anniversary Edition)

Brooks, Frederick P.; Addison-Wesley 1995 (ISBN 0-201-83595-9).
See http://www.awl-he.com/titles/14147.html.

The one book on software engineering that everyone should read.

Alan Cox: "This I'd recommend not for its technical value but for its application of common sense and reality to computing projects." JH: "Ah, yes. What if Linus had been given 200 programmers and had been told to produce Linux in 3 months!"

Bell System Technical Journal, July-August 1978, Vol. 57, No. 6, part 2

AT&T; 416 pp.

Many early papers on Unix, including Ritchie & Thompson, "The UNIX Time Sharing System"; Thompson, "UNIX Implementation"; Ritchie, "A Retrospective"; Bourne, "The UNIX Shell"...