Unix can be a complex and intimidating operating system for the novice user.
For further information on selected topics, we recommend the following
books to learn more about Unix and some of the common
packages available. If you have suggestions for additional books that
should be on this list, please contact the system administrators.
Abrahams, Paul W. and Bruce R. Larson. 1997. Unix for the Impatient, 2nd. Ed. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Hekman, Jessica, et al. 1999. Linux in a Nutshell, 2nd. Ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates.
Both these books are good general introductions to Unix. While the second book is written specifically for Linux, most of the material in it is applicable to other Unix operating systems.
Quercia, Valerie and Tim O'Reilly. 1993. Volume 3: X Window System User's Guide. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates.
This volume is the basic user guide for the X Window System. While written for X11R5, almost all of the material is still valid for later revisions of X.
Knuth, Donald E. 1989. The TEXbook. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Lamport, Leslie. 1994. LATEX: A Document Preparation System, 2nd Ed. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
Donald Knuth is the inventor of the TEX typesetting system, which he wrote to typeset his magnum opus, The Art of Computer Programming. Leslie Lamport then developed LATEX as a higher-level command set for use with TEX. This document was typeset using LATEX2e.
Kernighan, Brian W. and Dennis M. Ritchie. 1988. The C Programming Language, 2nd Ed. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
Stroustrup, Bjarne. 1997. The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Ed. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
These two texts are the definitive references for the C and C++ programming languages. Be sure to get the editions listed for each of these books, since there are many important changes from prior editions.
DuBois, Paul. 1995. Using csh and tcsh. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates.
Wall, Larry, Tom Christiansen, and Randall L. Schwartz. 1996. Programming Perl, 2nd Ed. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates.
The IMA uses tcsh as our standard interactive shell, and small scripts may be written with it. However, if you plan to write scripts of any length, we suggest you check out the Berkeley shell (sh or bash), or Perl, both of which are superior scripting languages to tcsh.
Geist, Al, Adam Beguelin, Jack Dongarra, Weiching Jiang, Robert Manchek, and Vaidy Sunderam. 1994. PVM: Parallel Virtual Machine -- A User's Guide and Tutorial for Networked Parallel Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gropp, William, Ewing Lusk, and Anthony Skjellum. 1996. Using MPI: Portable Parallel Programming with the Message Passing Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
MPI and PVM are packages to make portable parallel programming possible. MPI is the newer and currently more popular system, but there is still a lot of code in existence which uses PVM. Both packages work with Fortran or C/C++.