Reddit reviews Linux Application Development (paperback) (2nd Edition)

My favorite Linux programming book has these pearls in the contents:

• 9.4.1 - Having Children
  
  
• 9.4.2 - Watching your Children Die
  
  

Ugh...afraid I am not that much of a help there...too old ;) Lots of this actually comes from DOS (you know, the OS of microsoft before windows) programming books and books about the linux kernel in version 2.0 ;) So really old and probably not available anymore. And both had nothing to do with virtualization...just, well DOS was no multitasking system. Direct hardware access and even manipulating the memory mapping registers were common back then for normal programs (as only one program could run at a time...you could do whatever you wanted, nothing else could get in your way). All this is pretty useless knowledge nowadays...but it helped a lot to know the basics to somewhat understand "modern" stuff like virtualization...it's more just learning how it was done as the basics are still in large parts the same.

But afraid that means I have no clue about a modern book that would teach these topics nicely. (not to mention that my first books about that hardware stuff were still in German...only two years learning English at school were not enough back then to understand English programming books ;))

I heard some good about Linux kernel development but afraid didn't read it...so take with a grain of salt (And this is really more if you are interested how the kernel does things and how hardware access is really done, it's not a book that will help you much with "ordinary" daily work on a linux system.

Afraid I am not aware of any general purpose book for linux at all...there must be some for sure but afraid I always just looked into kind of specialized books...so can't help there at all.

A slightly higher level book that helped me a lot to deal with linux was linux application development (although I read it in the first edition..and german translation back then. In this case I have no excuse for that...by that time I should have been good enough in English to read the original..so probably just some teenager laziness). But this one is really good, leads you through the whole process of writing your own shell...requires basic C knowledge though.

What brings up something interesting...even if not linux related directly...any book about learning the basics of C will also help a lot with linux. I see that a bit different than learning a language like python for example..while learning python will of course also help you understanding linux better in some cases learning C gets you really dirty. It forces you to learn some basics about hardware...most other languages "shield" you there (exception c++ which is also very lowlevel and if you ask me the more interesting language to learn...but if you ask Torvalds he probably would have some strong words of disagreement there. So for the linux kernel learning C is better)

But overall...really better make a new question about this and ask a wider audience...afraid I am just the wrong person to give any good suggestions there.