To start with, this book is not a Sun user’s guide. It might be a Sun programmer’s guide--if the programmer is interested in programming for XView (Sun’s latest attempt to get around the Motif standard), or PostScript, or NeWS (a form of display PostScript). Or it might be a Sun administrator’s guide--if the administrator has other books to give her or him the complete details of the procedures that are only outlined in this book. It is not really anything, although it seems to be trying to be a little bit of everything.

Chapter 1, “An Introduction to OpenWindows,” is an introduction to how to manipulate windows and menus in Sun’s OpenWindows environment. Chapter 2, “SunOS,” presents basic UNIX commands and simple shell syntax. Chapter 3, “XView I,” is an introduction to writing C programs to control aspects of XView, including windows, buttons, and panels. Chapter 4, “XView II,” covers manipulating lower-level XView facilities in C, using an example program to show the details. Chapter 5, “Introduction to PostScript,” presents the basics of the PostScript page definition language, with examples. Chapter 6 is an “Introduction to NeWS,” the language used to control the Network Extensible Window System, built on top of PostScript to describe “canvases” on the CRT. Chapter 7, “Administration of Workstations,” covers such topics as account maintenance, dump and restore, disk space management, and NFS administration, none of them in any detail. Chapter 8, “SunOS Networking,” covers programming in C to control UNIX sockets and the Transport Layer Interface (TLI). Chapter 9, “Software Development on the Sun,” presents quick introductions to sccs, make, and debugging.

In summary, the book has three major problems for a supposed user’s guide. It does not cover the things a SunOS user really needs to know in any great detail. It spends too much space covering things that only programmers need to know. It covers topics (such as SunView and NeWS) that are not on the main standards paths that are being forged throughout the industry.

Better books for programmers are probably available on each of the things that this book tries to cover. Better users’ introductions to UNIX and the SunOS variant of it certainly exist. There is, in fact, really no reason to buy this book.