[GTALUG] Suggestions: A Book for a Beginner, new to the Linux Shell

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh at mimosa.com
Sun Jul 17 15:35:54 EDT 2016


| From: Peter Hiscocks via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| I learned the command line from a charming and very readable book:
| 'Starting with Unix' by P.J.Brown.

Interesting that you liked his writing.

Many years ago (in the 1970s) I read the manual he produced for ML/1,
his macroprocessor.  I was startled at how well the manual worked, at
least for me, at least at that time.  Perhaps the best manual I have read.

Apparently ML/1 was the result of his PhD research, completed in 1967.
Computers back then were a quite different beasts.  Still, I might
consider using ML/1 now.  Much more comfortable than M4.  Most of the
links here seem to be broken:
  <http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/pjbrown/public_html/ml1/>
This seems OK:
  <http://www.ml1.org.uk/>

I noticed that they have a PDP-8 implementation.  I thought that
ML/1 into 4K words (of 12 bits) would be impossible.  Turns out that
they used two "fields" originally, and then three.  So 8K and then 12K
words.  Still remarkable.

The implementation of ML/1 is quite interesting.  It was made to be
portable and self-compiling.  This is before C and UNIX.
  <http://www.ml1.org.uk/implementation.html>


More information about the talk mailing list