Gancarz finishes his book by explaining the ten "lesser tenets" to the UNIX philosophy. These are those philosophies that are not universally agreed upon and are often seen as moot. I thought some of these were very interesting, such as 'look for the 90 percent solution,' where he basically says that you can deliberately ignore those aspects of a problem that are costly, time-consuming, or difficult to implement. Your solution thus has a better "bang-for-the-buck" in implementation costs, and carries the attitude of "if someone needs this capability bad enough, they can do it themselves." Yet not all tenets were as worthwhile in my mind as this. He says to 'use lower case and keep it short' when typing any text in UNIX. It has been my general practice to adhere to the 'keep it short' part of this tenet. Terseness is highly valuable, especially with the piping abilities of the UNIX command line, were some commands may get pretty lengthy. But I say if someone wants to capitalize, capitalize. He explained that lower-case letters are generally easier to read. I disagree, I believe some words/phrases are easier to read if some of the letters (not just at random) are capitalized. But again, that's just a personal preference.
Regardless of whether I believe some of the lesser tenets are worth anything, they all seem to keep to the main theme of his 'dogmatic' tenets and his overall philosophy, to approach the development of operating systems and software with an eye towards the future. His philosophy assumes that hardware and the world in general is always changing. In order to lessen the inevitable hardships that accompany these changes, you should keep this philosophy in mind.
