A lot of books on programming rely on toy examples constructed
specifically to prove a point. This one won't. Our case studies
will be real, pre-existing pieces of software that are in
production use every day. Here are some of the major ones:
-
cdrtools/xcdroast
-
These two separate projects are usually used together.
The cdrtools package is a set of
CLI tools for writing CD-ROMs; Web search for “cdrtools”.
The xcdroast application is a
GUI front end for cdrtools; see the xcdroast project site.
-
fetchmail
-
The fetchmail program
retrieves mail from remote-mail servers using the POP3 or IMAP
post-office protocols. See the fetchmail home page (or search for
“fetchmail” on the Web).
-
GIMP
-
The GIMP (GNU Image
Manipulation Program) is a full-featured paint, draw, and
image-manipulation program that can edit a huge variety of graphical
formats in sophisticated ways. Sources are available from the GIMP home page (or search for
"GIMP" on the Web).
-
mutt
-
The
mutt mail user agent is the current
best-of-breed among text-based Unix electronic mail agents, with notably good
support for MIME
(Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) and the use of privacy aids
such as PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) and GPG (GNU Privacy Guard). Source
code and executable binaries are available at the Mutt project site.
-
xmlto
-
The xmlto command renders
DocBook and other XML documents in various output formats, including
HTML and text and PostScript. For sources and documentation, see the xmlto project site.
To minimize the amount of code the user needs to read to
understand the examples, we have tried to choose case studies that can
be used more than once, ideally to illustrate several different design
principles and practices. For this same reason, many of the examples
are from my projects. No claim that these are the best possible ones
is implied, merely that I find them sufficiently familiar to be useful
for multiple expository purposes.
