[mgerdts]

It was sometime around 1994 and I had working as a UNIX sysadmin / systems programmer for the college of engineering for about a year, while studying computer science. Most of what I was doing involved scary stuff like TCP/IP, other forms of IPC, terminals, permissions, filesystem quota management, etc. I often lacked confidence that I was doing it right.

Then one day I was at the book store and stumbled upon W. Richard Stevens Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. I spent hours reading it while sitting on the floor right in front of the empty spot on the store’s bookshelf. It taught me that much of why I was doing was right and helped fill in a bunch of gaps. A couple weeks later I was back with half a week’s pay to take it home with me.