This book taught me 6 must-know facts about Linux
This book taught me 6 must-know facts about Linux
https://www.howtogeek.com/this-book-taught-me-6-must-know-facts-about-linux/
Publish Date: 2026-03-06 12:01:00
Source Domain: www.howtogeek.com
The Art of Unix Programming (TAoUP), by Eric S. Raymond, is not a tutorial or how-to book. Instead, it is a book about the history and philosophy of Unix. But no other book has had a greater influence on my approach to Linux and macOS, or my everyday use of it. Here are just a few of the things it has taught me.
Unix is even older than you think
You don’t need to know the full history of Unix to use it—or Linux, or macOS—today. But knowing a bit about how Unix originated cannot hurt. Understanding the context of the OS helps you understand the screen you’re looking at, and history can answer many of your initial questions, like “Why are command names so short?”
The second chapter—“History: A Tale of Two Cultures”—explains how Unix began in 1969, on teletype machines that looked like glorified typewriters. It’s amazing to think that these machines still have something in common with many of the servers that power our lives online.
Nowadays, it’s fine to think of Linux as a Unix clone, which it essentially is. But that history is far longer and richer than it may seem, and I take pride in using a system with fifty-year-old roots, even in the face of every technological advance since then.
Open source would be nothing without Linux
TAoUP goes on to cover the birth of Linux and how Linus Torvald’s approach was a compromise between proprietary, locked-down systems and the ideological freedom that the burgeoning open-source movement lived by.
The open-source movement is so vital to Linux’s story, that it’s easy to consider them one and the same. But it’s fascinating to find out more about the history of open-source and how it compares with the proprietary approach or the GNU alternative (“free software”).
As far back as the 1950s, engineers were sharing source code, reading…
