By Irum Saleem
The latest book by Prof. Dr. Syed Mansoor Sarwar, Vice Chancellor, University of Engineering & Technology, Lahore — Unix: The Textbook, (third edition) — has been ranked 4th in Bookauthority’s ranking of Best Unix Books of All Time (bookauthority.org/books/best-unix-books).
The list was compiled based on the recommendations by top software engineers: Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Publishers fame), Julia Evans, Garry Tan and James Hong. As featured on CNN, Forbes and Inc, BookAuthority identifies and ranks the best books in the world based on public mentions, recommendations, ratings, and sentiment.
The book was published in November 2016 by CRC Press/Taylor & Francis (a subsidiary of Informa), Boca Raton, Florida, USA. The first two edition of the book were published by Addison-Wesley (a subsidiary of Pearson Education), Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Informa and Pearson are top-20 ranked publishers in the world.
The first edition of the book was translated into the Chinese and Spanish languages too.
The UNIX operating system was authored in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Labs research center. It is a robust and much safer system compared to other operating systems including Microsoft Windows.
In spite of being a 52-year old operating system, it remains extremely important because most of the Internet servers run on UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems.
Dr Sarwar’s books have been used in over 200 US colleges and universities, including some of the top universities such as University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Arizona, Stevens Tech, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Syracuse University.
These books are also being taught in several other countries including Canada, UK, Belgium, and Australia.
The Chinese and Spanish translations of his books are being used in China, Hong Kong, Spain, and Mexico. The US Navy in is using UNIX: The Textbook, Third Edition for one of its training programs. PAK DESTINY