Recommended Books

Here are a few books which we have used, and would recommend to people wanting to learn more about Linux.

Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition

Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini and Greg Kroah-Hartman
3rd Edition February 2005
ISBN: 0-596-00590-3
636 pages
£28.50, $39.95

If you are going to be writing a device driver for Linux, this is the best reference book around. It describes through worked examples how to handle many of the issues you will encounter, including memory allocation, access to hardware, time, modules, and interrupts.

Make sure that you get the third edition of this book, which cover the 2.6 kernel. The second edition only kernel version 2.4.

Link to the amazon.co.uk web page.
Link to the O'Reilly web page.
This book is also available online under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license. This site also has updates to the kernel API which occurred after the book was released.

For reference, the second edition is also still available online.

As part of writing the third edition of this book, the author Jonathan Corbet wrote several articles which are available from from the LWN site: http://lwn.net/Articles/driver-porting/.

IA-64 Linux Kernel: Design and Implementation

David Mosberger & Stephane Eranian
1st Edition, 30 January 2002
ISBN: 0130610143
522 pages
£47.99, $59.99

If you want to really understand how recent versions of the Linux kernel work, this is the best book we've seen. Each chapter follows the same style, of describing how the Linux kernel works, what features the IA-64 architecture provides, and how they have been used in the kernel implementation. Very well written, clear and remarkably error free. Worth reading even if you're not directly interested in the IA-64.

Link to the amazon.co.uk web page.
Link to the book's home page.