Unix + Reuse

This book contains the full text of the second editions of two of the author’s books: Advanced Topics In UNIX and Software Reuse: Methods, Models Costs.

Although the first edition of Advanced Topics In UNIX was originally published by John Wiley and Sons, and the first edition of Software Reuse: Methods, Models, Costs was originally published by McGraw-Hill, the second, electronic editions of both books were published by AfterMath in Baltimore, Maryland and are relatively available.


The two books have been packaged together because they fit well.  Indeed, the philosophy of each book influenced the other. at least to some extent, although there is essentially no overlap.  A few examples will illustrate the relationship.


Advanced Topics In UNIX emphasizes the develop of applications and systems software in complex environments with changing technology, such as is common in the world of UNIX, Linux, Solaris, Apple Darwin, Mach, and similar.  Linux alone has several flavors, including Fedora, Ubuntu, and SUSE and several popular file systems, such as ext, ext2, ext3, and ext4.  Linux has been ported to smartphones, although a recent patent case decision makes the future of such an installation hard to predict.  Surviving in this environment means understanding many types of system calls and how they interface.  The well-known classification of all UNIX artifacts as being either a process or a file certainly encourages reuse!


There are eleven chapters in Advanced Topics In UNIX: Introduction to UNIX, The User Interface, Input and Output, UNIX File Systems, Introduction to Processes, Memory and Process Management, Introduction to Interprocess Communication, The System V IPC Package, Signals, Sockets, and RPC, IPC Comparison, and Fault-Tolerant UNIX Software.


Software Reuse: Methods, Models, Costs emphasizes the cost efficient development of high-quality software systems in changing technology environments.  Our primary example of domain analysis, which is the analysis of software into potentially reusable artifacts, often at a higher level than simply source code modules, is the assessment of possibilities for reuse in the Linux kernel.


There are eight chapters in Software Reuse: Methods, Models, Costs: What is Software Reuse?, Techniques (which included domain analysis), Reuse Libraries, Certification of Reusable Software Components, The Economics of Software Reuse, Reengineering, Case Studies, and Tools For Software Reuse.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Ronald J. Leach recently retired as Professor and Chair Emeritus from the Department of Systems and Computer Science at Howard University, where he had taught since 1969.   He received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park and the M. S. degree in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.  His research interests include distributed systems, performance modeling and capacity planning; and most areas of software engineering, especially software reuse, fault-tolerance, and software performance measurement and their empirical foundations.  Some of his current work includes the application of computing to the social sciences, especially in the area of name matching within historical documents, using both his computer search skills and genealogical knowledge.  He is an experienced cruise ship lecturer, with special emphasis on identity theft and computer forensics.