This is the book I recommend on my www.c-for-dummies.com Web site for anyone who wants to get started in Linux programming. Dollar for pound, this book is well worth the steep cover price. Of course, it's techie. The information is packed in this over 900-page tome. The writing is small. There is no humor or personality. (Hey, it's a Wrox book!) But the sheer mass of data makes up for that.

The book covers just about any programming you can do with Linux. I was particularly pleased that it didn't prattle on about how Linux is this or that, or bore me with needless Linux/Unix history. Any background information you'll find directly relates somehow to programming Linux, which is such a bonus; it's always good to know the mechanics of how an operating system behaves before you set out to tell it what to do.

The main thrust of the book is C/C++ programming. If you're a C person, read chapter 6, which covers the Curses package. That lets you program for the terminal screen, which comes in handy when you're writing small-yet-useful programs. The book doesn't just limit itself to C, however. There's plenty of information on programming the Linux shell, database programming, plus using many of the other programming and debugging tools that come with most Linux distributions. Not to bore the nonprogrammer types, but here's the short list: Tcl, Perl, HTML, and CGI programming are all covered, as well as essential programming for system management.