Books about BSD

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We are now associated with Amazon.com so that you can order some of these books directly from them. Ordering from these "Order from Amazon" links is a way of helping to fund the OpenBSD project.

User Guides

"Berkeley UNIX" is so widely known that there is no need to list the basic "how-to" books about it here - there are too many to list! While some user guides exclusively cover System V Unix, or some other specific implementation such as Solaris, Linux, or whichever, most others try to be general. These are some that cover Berkeley UNIX.

UNIX Made Easy is one general book that is said to be good, though we've not tested it. (Order from Amazon)

Berkeley Unix: A Simple and Comprehensive Guide ( Order from Amazon)

For the more ambitious, An Introduction to Berkeley Unix and ANSI C ( Order from Amazon)

Every advanced UNIX user will probably want a copy of UNIX Power Tools, now in its second edition. This book discusses hundreds of neat tricks, little-known techniques, and add-on utilities. Be aware that many of the utilities are either included with OpenBSD or, more commonly, are already available as ports or packages. So most of section 52.03, complaining about how hard it is to port software to different UNIXes, can be disregarded if you learn about the Ports Mechanism that is part of OpenBSD. ( Order from Amazon)

You may see reference to the 4.4 BSD User's Reference Manual (URM), (O'Reilly, 1994). This is just a reprint of the man pages for users. Your OpenBSD distribution includes the online man pages, which are specific to OpenBSD, and more up-to-date. So you don't need this one: use the man command instead.

Administering the OpenBSD System

We can't unreservedly recommend any books specifically on OpenBSD Administration at present. However, if you're administering OpenBSD you may also have to administer other versions of UNIX. A good book on UNIX administration, with special mentions of details in SunOS, Solaris, and BSDI (the commercial 4.4BSD distribution) is UNIX System Administration Handbook (Second Edition, by Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, et al.) ( Order from Amazon.)

The 4.4 BSD System Manager's Manual (SSM) (O'Reilly, 1994) details what you need to know to run a BSD system. Quite a bit of this material is relevant to OpenBSD. Unfortunately it is currently out of print. Worse, due to licensing restrictions from AT&T, the electronic editions of these were not included in the 4.4BSD distributions, so most of them are not included with OpenBSD. The few that are may be found via the Documents page.

Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls (Wes Sonnenreich, Tom Yates) describes the OpenBSD 2.5 installation process and the elementary management of the system firewalling tools. ( Order from Amazon.)

We recommend against buying books that concentrate on installation or configuration of particular "other" distributions of BSD, as the installation procedures for each are wildly different.

Books on Programming Under the BSD System

4.4 BSD Programmer's Reference Manual (PRM) (O'Reilly, 1994) is a printed version of the Programmer's Manual. You have the online man pages, which are specific to OpenBSD, instead. Since the descriptions in the book pre-date the POSIX specification, please use the online pages, using the man command.

BSD-Lite 4.4 CD-ROM Companion: International Edition (UC Berkeley Staff, Computer Systems Research Group; O'Reilly, 1994) is a neat little package containing a CD-ROM with just the unbundled portions of 4.4BSD-Lite-1, which is not only obsolete, but also an incomplete and unbootable system. A small booklet is included listing the original BSD contributors, and an index to the printed man pages. Besides being a piece of history, this is not very useful. We suggest you buy an OpenBSD CD-ROM instead.

A much older book which still sheds much light on the philosophy of programming UNIX is The UNIX Programming Environment, (Kernighan and Pike). While not specific to BSD, most of it applies today. ( Order from Amazon).

Brian Kernighan had a hand in two other books which we recommend even though they're not UNIX specific, but are useful to programmers on UNIX and elsewhere. The Practice of Programming (with Rob Pike, 1999) covers practical programming considerations for C, C++ and Java. ( Order from Amazon).

The older of the two is The Elements of Programming Style. This book contains more common sense than many books triple or quadruple its weight. ( Order from Amazon).

Books about how the System works, for those wanting to modify it

The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System Marshal Kirk McKusick, Keith Bostic, Michael J. Karels, John S. Quarterman Addison-Wesley: 1996. ISBN 0-201-54979-4.
At 549 pages plus an index, this must be considered comprehensive. McKusick, Bostic and Karels are well known as prime movers at Berkeley CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) during the 4.3/4.4BSD period. This book covers the 4.4 and 4.4-Lite releases, and discusses everything you wanted to know about how the system operates. Not 100% applicable, but probably the closest there is to an overall system internals manual for OpenBSD. ( Order from Amazon).

The Design and Implementation of the 4.3 BSD Unix Operating System (Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk McKusick).
An earlier book from many of the same good folk at CSRG. Slightly dated, but gives an overall feel for the beast if you can find it real cheap at a garage sale.

The Design and Implementation of the 4.3 BSD Unix Operating System : Answer Book Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk McKusick 1991
Answers to the "exercises for the reader" in the 4.3 version of the book.

Source Code Secrets: The Basic 386BSD Operating System Reference (Volume 1 of Operating System Source Code Secrets) (L. W. Jolitz, William Jolitz, 1997)
The Jolitzes built the first port of BSD to the PC-386 architecture, and deserve a lot of credit for making BSD portable to this low-cost architecture. The earliest versions, called "386bsd", were described in articles in Dr. Dobbs Journal. This book goes beyond the articles, and provides a comprehensive annotated collection of source code. Not all of it applies to modern versions of OpenBSD, of course, but you can still learn a lot from it. Order from Amazon

Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition with Source Code, Peer-to-Peer ommunications, 1996. ISBN 1-57398-013-7. Although the UNIX described in this book is to BSD as a Model T Ford is to a 70's Mustang or Thunderbird, UNIX inventor Ken Thompson claims that "After 20 years, this is still the best exposition of the workings of a 'real' operating system." Originally circulated in illicit photocopies, this is the book that most first- and second-generation UNIX hackers cut their code-teeth on. Recommended as a good introduction to how a timesharing OS works, if you've not been inside one before. Substantially shorter than the McKusick book above. ( Order from Amazon)