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Life with UNIX: A Guide for Everyone
This book covers not only UNIX history, but also the "UNIX way of computing". It's probably not a good starting book on Unix, but it's a must for anyone who has ever used (and liked) UNIX systems.All UNIX flavors are mentioned. It could talk about linux, but the book was written before linux came to life.It's centainly a classic!
Life with UNIX: A Guide for Everyone
biff is the dogs name that barked at the mailman; biff is the routine that alerts the operator to incoming email. it goes on and on. the various celebrities of the creation had their reasons and this book puts them out there. it helps me to know how and why and who and when.
BUCK PETERS, RANCHMAN.
One of the earlies series, and one I've always liked, really glad to find it in print.
The Butterfly's Wing
I was at first skeptical of this novel when I read the book jacket, but within the first couple of pages I was completely engrossed in the formation of these beautifully drawn characters. Martin Foreman skillfully develops two very unique and distinctive voices, detailing the day to day lives of the main characters. It is his eye for the little touches that really makes this book work. This is not an action adventure story, as one might presume of a kidnapping story, but an in-depth analysis of the traumas and mundanities of the time spent waiting for the release of a hostage.... With it comes a layman’s understanding of world sociology. A worthy read.
The Butterfly's Wing
First published in 1996, The Butterfly's Wing is an affecting and engaging novel about a relationship between two men, and what happens when an act of terrorism forces them apart. Andy, an officer in a world aid organization, is kidnapped and held hostage in Peru, leaving Tom alone in England, not knowing what is happening to his lover or if he will ever see him again.The power of this story lies in the two voices that are telling it. Tom, who has been alone on their jointly-owned English smallholding for over a year now, tries to relieve his pain by starting a journal, in the form of a long letter to Andy. This device is wisely chosen by the author, for Tom, who has had a hardscrabble life moving from one waitering job to another, lives an existence that is centered on Andy, and the second-person narrative powerfully conveys his need.Elsewhere in the world, in a miserable cell where he doesn't even have enough food or blankets, Andy at least has pen and paper, so he's writing as well. He's a well educated man and his journal takes a more conventional form, though there is raw emotion there too. All of this means that reading this book is no walk in the park. And yet, if that's a downside to the book, it's also part of the upside. There is nothing inauthentic in these pages. Martin Foreman has done important work in HIV in the developing world, and his grasp of world politics and economics convincingly informs Andy's writing and his arguments with his captors. Just as tellingly, every detail of Tom's life on a struggling farm seems real. To an important degree, this book and these lives have been lived by the author.Tom and Andy also reflect on their lives as gay men. When Tom came out he was disowned by his family, while Andy met with only grudging acceptance from his parents. The two men are, in their own ways, amazed by the love they have found for each other. But there is nothing private in their world, and when the media "break" the news that Andy is gay and has a lover waiting for him at home, the new angle to their story has the potential to harm them both. Will Tom's sexuality gain him ill favor among those who would otherwise help him? Will Andy's captors kill or torture him because he is gay?The well-read Andy is familiar with the work of Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, and invokes those names in his journal. I would add Malcolm Lowry to the short list of fiction writers who have painstakingly explored the intersection of the political and the personal, seeking out those profound moments when something as slight as the stir of a butterfly's wing changes lives on the opposite side of the world. Oh, and add Martin Foreman's name, too: he has earned it.
Elementary differential topology;: Lectures given at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fall, 1961 (Annals of mathematics studies)
Munkres' "Elementary Differential Topology" was intended as a supplement to Milnor'sDifferential topologynotes (which were similar to hisTopology from the Differentiable Viewpointbut at a higher level), so it doesn't cover most of the material that standard introductory differential topology books do. Rather, the author's purpose was to (1) give the student a feel for the techniques of differential topology and practice in using them, and (2) prove a couple of basic and important results that at the time (1961) had not appeared in book form. Thus this book could not serve as a textbook for a course in the subject, but could be useful perhaps as a workbook for a student who wanted to practice solving problems. The word "elementary" in the title merely indicates that no algebraic topology is used in the proofs (with one minor exception, to show that a disk cannot be mapped homeomorphically onto an annulus) - its use was not intended as an indication of the level of the book, although it is pretty elementary anyway.That this is not suitable as a text for learning differential topology is apparent from what material has been omitted: Sard's theorem, Whitney's imbedding theorem, Morse theory, transversality (except for a brief mention in the last couple of pages), the degree of a map, intersection theory, differential forms, vector bundles (except for the tangent and normal bundles), etc., to say nothing of more advanced topics such as cobordism or surgery.So what is covered? Aside from basic definitions of C^r manifolds (i.e., manifolds with charts that have transition functions that are r times continuously differentiable), submanifolds, immersions, diffeomorphisms, bump functions, partitions of unity, and the inverse and implicit function theorems (proved only for Euclidean spaces), the results are divided into 2 sets: Those having to do with approximating a map with certain features by other maps (generally, showing that the set of maps with certain properties, such as imbeddings, immersions, diffeomorphisms, etc., is open in a certain function space). From this follows the well-known result that all C^r (r>=1) manifolds are smooth, the highlight of the first 2/3 of the book. Along the way, a few results are demonstrated that are needed in the proof, such as the existence of tubular neighborhoods and an imbedding theorem that is much weaker than Whitney's, but not much time is spent on them. This part ends with a proof of the uniqueness of the double of a manifold. Virtually all of these results can be found in Hirsch'sDifferential Topologyin the first 2 chapters, proved much simpler and with modern notation. However, by keeping his presentation more geometric and with a minimum of formalism, it may be easier to follow Munkres' proofs (not that Hirsch is hard). As an example, Munkres uses for the topology of his function spaces the strong C^1 topology, rather than the compact-open topology that Hirsch uses.The second part of the book, the final 40 pages or so, is devoted to proving that smooth manifolds are actually PL manifolds, and that the triangulation of a smooth manifold with a given smooth structure is essentially unique (a kind of smooth Hauptvermutung - this is not true for PL manifolds in general). This classic result is not usually included in differential topology (or PL topology) books - in fact, I can't think of another book which does contain this proof, making this the best (only?) reason to own this book. The proof itself is not that interesting, consisting of the standard manipulations of simplices that one usually sees in PL topology or older homology theory.There are many "exercises" through the book, which generally ask the reader to fill in the details of proofs or extend the results of them. These tend to be pretty easy, whereas the many "problems" are harder. For these, hints are often given, so they usually aren't that difficult either (although one problem is labeled as "unsolved"). Aside from the proof that smooth => PL, the only other benefit of reading this book is to practice doing these exercises. But overall, this is far inferior to the aforementioned works of Milnor, Hirsch, Wallace (Differential Topology: First Steps), or Guillemin and Pollack (Differential Topology).