Re: UNIX tips for SWARM FAQ. Please Contribute, prove your team spirit!

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Y'all,

Thought I'd contribute to this thread.

a) Indispensable reference on Unix

If you only buy one book on Unix I highly recommend "Unix in a Nutshell" from
O'Reilly. At first it may seem useless, because it only lists commands and what
they do (i.e. you can't look up "how do I find stuff", you'll have to know that
"find", "whereis" etc. are the relevant commands.) But after you have paid the
initial costs of entry into Unix you'll find this book indispensable.

b) Pretty handy book on C

Some textbooks on C tend to be way to big and bulky. I rely heavily on a pretty
decent pocket reference which has all the information you might need on the
standard libraries in a very handy format. It's called
    "C the Pocket Reference - Second Edition"
    Herbert Schildt
    1991, Osborne McGraw-Hill,   New York
    ISBN 0-07-881783-8

Stay away from Schildt's textbook on C, it is disorganized and full of pretty
serious errors (there is a whole page on the web dedicated to listing these
errors - of course I only found out after I had plunked down my $36 and gone
trough the whole book).

c) Use RCS

I've recently discovered the benefits of using RCS to manage my simulation
projects. I'm sure that everyone who has spent more than a couple of weeks
developing the same simulation knows the feeling that you loose track of all
the changes you are making. Tarring and zipping up subsequent "generations" of
the project is one solution, but you are still don't have a log of what changes
have been made.

RCS basically manages the project and keeps a log of all your changes. The
basic premise is that each time you make changes you "check in" files into the
program, which first of all means that the files become write protected and
second means that RCS prompts you for an update to the log and files away
information on the changes made. Then when you want to make more changes you
"check out" the respective file. If you want to back up several generations on
the file, you can ask RCS to undo the changes.

Another aspect of RCS is that Emacs automatically interfaces with the program,
so you can do all the stuff mentioned above directly from the editor. It's no
sweat, believe me - I spent all of 30 seconds to understand the concept.

I learned all I know about RCS from the Nutshell book, which has 3-4 pages on
it, and the man pages on RCS. It is included on the RedHat disks and should be
somewhere on most decent Unix systems.

Regards,
-Benedikt


------------------
Benedikt Stefansson                 address@hidden
Department of Economics, UCLA       Fax. (310) 825-9528
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477          Tel. (310) 825-1777



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