Interprocess Communications in Unix: The Nooks and Crannies

18689-0 Simply the clearest, most thorough guide to UNIX interprocess communications. When it comes to the UNIX interprocess communications, techniques that are essential to distributed, client/server computing, no other book offers this much depth-or this much clarity. Starting with the basics, Interprocess Communication in UNIX explains exactly what UNIX processes are, how they are generated, and how they can access their own environments. You'll begin by mastering fundamental topics like library functions and system calls, handling system error messages, and then learn about the UNIX processing environment, parent and child processes, and process groups. Simple communication techniques using signaling, lock files, and file locking are described in detail. Building carefully from basic to more advanced concepts, the book offers complete, easy-to-understand explanations of every widely used technique for UNIX interprocess communications, including: * Named and unnamed pipes * Message queues: creation, control, and operation * Semaphores and semaphore sets * Shared memory operations, mapping memory to files * Remote procedure calls * Sockets Learn how local function calls can be transformed into remote procedures; how to debug an RPC application, and how to use broadcasting to search for RPC services on remote systems. Understand all you need to know about sockets IPC using UNIX and ARPA Internet protocols. Throughout this book you'll find extensive examples, summary boxes and exercises to test your understanding. Whether you're a programmer or an advanced student, you'll be surprised how quickly this book can teach you sophisticated UNIX interprocess communication techniques.

Beginning with the basics of what a process is, how a process is generated, and how a process accesses its own environment, this book details process communication techniques, starting with the basics of process communications, and proceeding to the complexitites of socket- based comunications.