Advanced Linux Programming Paperback – Jun 11 2001

This book offers a concise introduction to systems programming on Linux. While the title includes the word "Advanced", it is, as others have noted, an introductory book. It is only "Advanced" in the sense that it assumes that the reader is already a competent C programmer.
The main focus on the UNIX programming section is on threads, IPC and processes. It also includes a concise primer on using tools such as gdb, make, gcc, and emacs. The second part focuses on Linux specifics: Devices, the proc filesystem and Linux system calls. There's also a section on inline assembly, and security (not really Linux specific), and the book ends with a sample application.
The reason this book gets "only" 4 stars is that I find it too Linux-centric. For example, the authors recommend getopt_long, which is not portable, though it is convenient. autoconf and libtool, which are essential to obtain maintain portability across multiple gcc versions, are not even mentioned.
On the other hand, the in-depth coverage of Linux features is useful. But it would be nice if the authors were more clear about which functions were Linux specific, and which were general POSIX /XOpen calls.
The highlight of the book is the sample application. The application is a simple web-server that uses dynamically loaded modules. [...] runs the foobar module. I consider dynamic "modular programming" ("plugins") to be an important and neglected programming paradigm, concealed beneath hype about "Object Oriented" programming. Most large-scale architectures make heavy use of modules. For example, KDE, GNOME, Apache, Perl, the Linux kernel, and Mozilla all make heavy use of dynamically loaded modules. The sample application gives some insight into how large scale modular projects work.
My conclusion -- this book is certainly a worthwhile addition to a Linux programmers bookshelf, though I still consider "Beginning Linux Programming" (Stones/Matthew) to be the best introductory book for a complete introduction to programming on Linux, and more generally, UNIX.

Working on this book was a privilege and a joy. As opposed to the money-minded "doorstop"/quantity-over-quality format that most computer/programming books fall into, this text is relatively lean and mean. The examples are beautiful in many ways: as pure code, as examples of how to comment code clearly and completely, and as examples of how to teach concepts. In each and every case the authors provided one of the better clarifications of a programming concept I have ever encountered. If you have tinkered with programming in a GNU/Linux environment, are reasonably comfortable with C code ("reasonably" is relative since this code is so well-commented) and are looking to take your knowledge to the next level, I cannot recommend this book too highly. I believe it is destined to become a classic!

As some other reviewers had mentioned, do not be intimitated by the "advanced" word in the title. The book goes through a lot of more advanced aspect of Linux programming, especially towards the end, but it gives such a good introduction to linux beginners and have such nice pace throughout the book that any newbie would become totally familiar with linux programming after finished reading this text.
First section: Getting started. If you've ever written program in Linux, you'd be familiar with things in this section. It acts as a good reference to things like using GCC, makefile, GNU debugger, etc.
Second 3 and 4 dive into processes and thread. The author spend decent amoung of time explainning the differences between the two, and how both of them work internally. Fork() system(), exec() pthread_create() and other functions are covered in details. The author also give enough word on how to clean things up.
Some system calls are discussed, as well as how linux interacts with devices (/dev) and the /proc directory. Security was given a full chapter in the book. Sure there could have been more on writing secured codes, but it really is out of the scope of this book.
The author gives simple examples as he progresses, and there's one big example at the end that would give you a extremely clear idea how all the things mentioned in the book can be integrated. The GNU http server is one of the best example I'd seen in programming books.
This book is one of the best written Linux programming book.

This book was a pleasant surprise. Not 700-1000 pages, but just above 300 pages and packed with information and small workable c-examples. I was walked through creating basic applications, shared & static libraries, sockets, pipes and security, forks/threads and detailed expamples on synchronization mechanisms. The book also guides you through creation of a relatively simple web server with plugin-modules. Quite fun !
So in addition to discover how typical intermediate/advanced programming tasks were handled in Linux I also learned a lot more on how the system works.
No shell programming here - only C. Keep your Linux box close by when reading!