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Page 3 title: Philosophy Matters
This is a book about Unix programming, but in it we're going to toss around the words 'culture', 'art' and 'philosophy' a lot. If you are not a programmer, or you are a programmer that has had little contact with the Unix world, this may seem strange. But Unix has a culture; it has a distinctive art of programming; and it carries with it a powerful design philosophy. Understanding these traditions will help you build better software, even if you're developing for a non-Unix platform.
Every branch of engineering and design has technical cultures. In most kinds of engineering, the unwritten traditions of the field are parts of a working practitioner's education as important as (and, as experience grows, often more important than) the official handbooks and textbooks. Senior engineers develop huge bodies of implicit knowledge, which they pass to their juniors by (as Zen Buddhists put it) "a special transmission, outside the scriptures".
Software engineering is generally an exception to this rule; in most of its sub-specialties, technology has changed so rapidly, software environments come and gone so quickly, that technical cultures have been weak and evanescent. There are, however, exceptions to this exception...
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