The USENIX Association and O'Reilly & Associates have published the final, definitive release of the Berkeley version of UNIX, which has been the basis for many commercial UNIX variants. Written by the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, the complete five volume set includes a CD-ROM can be ordered directly from USENIX. USENIX members receive a special discount.

Below is a brief summary of each volume.

4.4BSD User's Reference Manual (URM)*
898 pp. ISBN 1-56592-075-9, June 1994

This volume (URM) collects the manpages for the more than 284 user programs that make up the user portion of the 4.4BSD UNIX release (section 1 of the traditional UNIX Reference Manual), plus additional pages for games (section 6 of the traditional manual) and miscellaneous information (section 7, which includes mostly information on troff macro packages and other text processing information.) URM is useful even if you don't use the BSD version of UNIX. Many of the commands are compatible with the POSIX standard and thus identical to those in other UNIX versions. Because 4.4BSD includes many freeware programs that are available but not documented in other versions of UNIX, you may find yourself turning first to this book to look up options for programs like Perl, GNU emacs, compress, patch, g++, or kerberos.

4.4BSD System Manager's Manual (SMM)
646 pp. ISBN 1-56592-080-5, May 1994

SMM includes manpages for system administration commands (section 8 of the online reference manual), plus supplementary documents useful to system administrators.

4.4BSD Programmer's Supplementary Documents (PSD)
606 pp. ISBN 1-56592-079-1, June 1994

In this volume, you'll find useful papers on such tools as the gdb and adb debuggers, source code control systems RCS and SCCS, lex and yacc, and the m4 macro processor. You'll also find such historical documents as Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson's classic first paper about UNIX and Kernighan and Ritchie's classic introduction to UNIX programming.

On a more up to date note, this book also includes a two part tutorial on interprocess communication (IPC) under 4.4BSD UNIX.

4.4BSD Programmer's Reference Manual (PRM)*
868 pp. ISBN 1-56592-078-3, June 1994

PRM collects the manpages for the various UNIX programming libraries, plus related information for programmers. It consists of sections 2 through 5 of the online manpage collection:

(2) UNIX System Calls

(3) C Library Subroutines

(4) Special Files (device interfaces)

(5) File Formats

4.4BSD User's Supplementary Documents (USD)
686 pp. ISBN 1-56592-076-7, June 1994

This volume, the User's Supplementary Documents, collects papers relating to miscellaneous "user" tools, principally text editors and document processors.

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