Seeing that Mike Gancarz explicitly stated in his preface to the book that I would benefit greatly from reading his book, and almost assuming that I had a distrust for the UNIX operating system based only on the fact that I haven't used it yet, I was somewhat displeased to find out that he was right. I have yet to read past chapter four but I am already reaping the benefits that he proposed I would.
He began with an introduction to and a history of the UNIX operating system, citing names of people and places that I didn't particularly think was very beneficial for me to know. He soon thereafter broke down the UNIX philosophy "in a nutshell," listing nine tenets that were seen as dogmatic to UNIX developers and 10 "lesser tenets" that are seen as "not-so-dogmatic" to UNIX developers. Many of these tenets I thought were almost common sense to people in the computing world. I thought to myself, yes Mr. Gancarz your right, those are all very important and thank for listing them out for me. But I thought to myself, "What's the big deal?
Well, according to him I was suppose to be thinking at the time "What is all the fuss about?" I was close. He then began to show me exactly what all the fuss was about. In reading the following chapter, as he expanded on tenets 1 (small is beautiful) and 2 (make each program do one thing well), through his obvious love for the metaphor I began to see why these philosophical views on programming were so beneficial. He not only expanded on how each tenet would be important to me but also gave great examples, explained consequences, defined benefits, and basically convinced me that not abiding by these tenets would be incredibly detrimental to me. Reading on through chapter 3 and tenet 3 (Build a prototype as soon as possible), I was finished questioning his belief that I would benefit greatly from this book and instead just questioned if he was going to continue the one giant metaphor per tenet writing philosophy he has abided by so well thus far. I guess I need to read on to see.
