Over the years I have been involved in a few major projects (“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe….”) that are worth preserving here.
C Programming in a Unix Environment
The first was a textbook that Judy Kay and I wrote in the 1980’s on the C programming language.
As well as describing and teaching the language as it was at the time in a fairly complete manner, we also wanted to show how it fitted into the Unix programming environment. We spent some time describing “make” and also the basic Unix system calls.
We argued with the publisher over the title. They insisted on “C Programming in a Unix Environment” while we wanted “C programming in the Unix Environment”. But they won.
During negotiation with the publisher we also insisted that we retain the copyright so we were free to use it in course, give it away, modify it etc. We won this in return for a slightly lower royalty. But not many academic textbooks make the authors wealthy and we weren’t concerning about the income.
We still have the full source code for the book written in Troff. I developed a system that allowed program fragments to be embedded in the book text while running tests on the program automatically when the book kwas built. We had seen too many books that had bugs in the source code of the examples.
Unfortunately, it is no longer possible to make the book since we don’t have access to troff anymore. Groff is the successor to troff but it is not exactly compatible and I don’t have the time to change the book source to match.
We do have a PDF version of the postscript that was generated by a fairly final draft in 1988.
Feel free to take a copy but don’t try to sell it. It is out of date now since it refers to an early version of the language. If you use it in a course, please acknowledge that it is Copyright Judy Kay and Bob Kummerfeld 1989.