Michael Kerrisk

This book is an exhaustive description of the Linux/UNIX system calls and related C-library functions. It could also be used as a reference.

The book is nicely divided into chapters, each of which is approximately 30 pages long and can that be read in one sitting. The text is very readable and carefully worded, which is quite a feat for a book with 1400 pages. The book is written in a serious tone.

The only negative points (nitpicking?) for me were the following:
a) Sometimes I would have liked more precise descriptions of how shell commands (i.e., mainly the executables that are described in section 1 of the man-pages) are implemented in terms of the presented system-calls/library-functions (e.g. netstat, tcpdump).
b) I found the description of the stdio-library incomplete; for example fopen is never gets a dedicated explanation.… (más)