Recommended Books

These are books I recommend either because their subject matter is important or useful (and books on that subject are rare), or because the books themselves are among the best available on their subject. Currently the list is mostly O'Reilly books, but there are many other excellent books still to be added.... See the SAGE SysAdmin's Bookshelf and the Linux Reading List HOWTO (not just for Linux anymore!) for more. Also, the Hacker Jargon File has a bibliography of "books you can read to help you understand the hacker mindset".

The popularity of Linux has caused a glut in the market of books about Unix-related topics. However, there are really only a few publishers that matter:

There are some up-and-comers that look promising, but they don't have nearly the reputable track record of those listed above. These are:

SSC (Specialized Systems Consultants)
The Coriolis Group
New Riders (one of the better divisons of the otherwise-mediocre Macmillan)

Be wary of computer books from other publishers, particularly some prolific three- and four-letter publishers of computer books. (i.e. the Que and SAMS divisions of Macmillan.) Some are good, but most are junk (or at least poorly edited).

Index

General Users
System Administration
- General Background
- More Specific System Administration Topics
Programming and Scripting
Document Preparation
History & Culture

General Users

UNIX for the Impatient
Paul W. Abrahams & Bruce R. Larson
Addison-Wesley: A favorite of many. Has been recommended in the OSU CIS Department for Unix beginners.
When You Can't Find Your UNIX System Administrator Linda Mui O'Reilly & Associates: Plenty of useful tips for non-sysadmins.
UNIX in a Nutshell: System V Edition Daniel Gilly & the Staff of O'Reilly & Associates O'Reilly & Associates: A handy reference for SysV and Solaris 2.
Learning the UNIX Operating System Jerry Peek, Grace Todino & John Strang O'Reilly & Associates

System Administration

General Background

Unix System Administration Handbook (see also http://www.admin.com/)
Nemeth, Snyder, Seebass, Hein
Prentice Hall / PTR: Highly Recommended. Extremely useful for all aspects of system administration, especially if you have to deal with more than one commercial version of Unix. Third edition (The Purple Book) covers Solaris, HP-UX, FreeBSD, and Red Hat Linux. (The second edition (The Red Book) covered Solaris 2, SunOS 4, IRIX, OSF/1 (aka Digital Unix and Compaq Tru64 Unix), HP-UX, and BSD/OS (aka BSDi).) If you run one of those systems, and you only buy one system administration book, buy this one. If you run more than one of these systems, buy this book.
Essential System Administration AEleen Frisch O'Reilly & Associates: Not quite as good as the Nemeth et al book, but still good. Second edition covers SunOS 4.1, Solaris 2.4, AIX 4.1, Linux 1.1, Digital UNIX, OSF/1, SCO UNIX 3.x, HP/UX 9 & 10, and IRIX 6.x.
Solaris 7 Reference Janice Winsor Prentice Hall / PTR: The official reference for Solaris 7.
Solaris Security Peter H. Gregory Prentice Hall / PTR: The official security reference for Solaris.
Practical UNIX & Internet Security Simson Garfinkel & Gene Spafford O'Reilly & Associates: The classic security book.
TCP/IP Network Administration Craig Hunt O'Reilly & Associates
4.4BSD System Manager's Manual Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley O'Reilly & Associates: Useful if you run any BSD derivative (e.g. SunOS 4, Ultrix, FreeBSD). (Out of print, but now available online from the FreeBSD and NetBSD projects.)
Windows NT & UNIX: Administration, Coexistence, Integration, & Migration G. Robert Williams and Ellen Beck Gardner Addison-Wesley

Programming and Scripting

General Background Knowledge

Porting UNIX Software Greg Lehey O'Reilly & Associates
UNIX Systems Programming for SVR4 David A. Curry O'Reilly & Associates: System V Release 4 is at least partly the basis of most modern Unixes, particularly Solaris.
Linux Application Development Michael K. Johnson & Erik W. Troan Addison-Wesley: Useful beyond Linux, since Linux is basically POSIX, and development tools there are useful elsewhere. This covers many useful development tools not covered in other books, as well as giving a lucid description of common POSIX system facilities.
Managing Projects with make Andrew Oram & Steve Talbott O'Reilly & Associates: If you compile programs, whether you wrote them yourself or not, you need to understand make and makefiles.
Mastering Regular Expressions Jeffrey E. F. Friedl O'Reilly & Associates: Regular expressions appear everywhere in the Unix world, such as in grep, perl, sed, awk, vi, emacs, and many other programs.
Applying RCS and SCCS Don Bolinger & Tan Bronson O'Reilly & Associates: About the common utilities for file and project version control. Keep track of changes made to your files (even your system files).
Open Source Development with CVS Karl Franz Fogel The Coriolis Group: CVS is the next generation of version control systems after RCS, and is better suited to maintaining complete projects rather than individual files. This book not only covers CVS and its use in open-source projects, but also covers the open-source method and philosophy itself.

Specific Languages

Programming Perl Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Randal L. Schwartz O'Reilly & Associates: The Perl Bible. Also known as the Camel Book. Buy this if you do anything in Perl.
The C Programming Language Brian Kernighan & Dennis Richie Prentice Hall / PTR: The definitive book on C.
Practical C Programming Steve Oualline O'Reilly & Associates: On writing C that works reliably and portably. For those who care about the quality of their code (which should be every programmer).
The C++ Programming Language Bjarne Stroustrup Addison-Wesley: The definitive book on C++.
Practical C++ Programming Steve Oualline O'Reilly & Associates
Exploring Expect Don Libes O'Reilly & Associates: Automate interactive tasks with this tcl extension. Also helps teach tcl.
Portable Shell Programming Bruce Blinn Prentice-Hall: Shell scripts are the basic way of writing programs that will run on any Unix system. This book talks about writing them well and making them as portable as possible.
Learning the Korn Shell Bill Rosenblatt O'Reilly & Associates: Learn about programming and interacting with the best shell normally bundled with commercial Unix systems.
sed & awk Dale Dougherty & Arnold Robbins O'Reilly & Associates: The two most powerful shell scripting tools.

Advanced Unix Programming

The UNIX Programming Environment Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike Prentice Hall / PTR: Explains the underlying philosophy and tools of Unix programming. It's quite dated in places (e.g. command line editing), but still useful background knowledge.
Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment W. Richard Stevens Addison-Wesley: Anyone doing serious Unix programming needs this book. So many "how do I..." programming questions that cross my path are answered there. It's geared toward C (like most of Unix itself), but C++, Perl, and Python programmers will also find it useful.
UNIX Network Programming W. Richard Stevens Prentice Hall / PTR: A classic, covering programming for network and interprocess communication applications. The first edition is one volume, but the second edition (new in 1998) is two volumes. (Stevens died before completing the planned third volume of the second edition.)

Document Preparation

A Guide to LaTeX Helmut Kopka & Patrick W. Daly Addison-Wesley: Even better in many ways than the "official" references (below); it seems to have the most useful things they have, and it's organized better. It is wonderful for reference, and I consider it indispensable whenever I'm writing LaTeX.
LaTeX: A Document Preparation System Leslie Lamport Addison-Wesley: Written by the author of LaTeX, this serves as a good introduction to the basics of the package (and what has changed since version 2.09). It does not cover the more powerful features that come from add-in packages (which are usually included in LaTeX distributions by default these days), so it can be a bit frustrating. Its organization is not very useful for reference purposes.
The LaTeX Companion Michel Goossens, Frank Mittelbach, and Alexander Samarin Addison-Wesley: This describes many of the advanced features and packages not described in Lamport's book, though there is some information duplicated from Lamport's. Like Lamport's book, it is better for introduction than for reference.
The LaTeX Graphics Companion Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, Frank Mittelbach Addison-Wesley: The companion to the Companion, this covers what isn't covered by Lamport and the Companion. Most of this material is not well covered by Kopka & Daly either. Postscript is a major topic of discussion here, unlike the other books (and these days most TeX documents end up in PostScript form before being printed or converted to PDF). I find this one extremely useful when writing any documents that include graphics in any way, and it also helps when thinking about the final Postscript form of any document.
The LaTeX Web Companion Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, Eitan Gurari, Ross Moore and Robert Sutor Addison-Wesley: About combining the power of LaTeX with the accessability of the Web. Includes information about Acrobat/PDF and XML, as well as HTML.

History & Culture

Hackers (see also the entry at Amazon.com) Steven Levy Delta / Random House: Covers the history of hackerdom from the 1950s to the early 1980s. (This has almost nothing to do with criminally breaking into computers.)
The New Hacker's Dictionary edited by Eric S. Raymond MIT Press (online as The Jargon File): Hacker culture and vocabulary.
Open Sources edited by Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman & Mark Stone O'Reilly & Associates: A collection of writings by the most important figures in the Open Source / Free Software movement.