“The Linux Core Kernel Commentary was patterned on the classic
Lions’ Commentary on Unix, which was a Unix hacker’s resource for
years. The Commentary on Unix helped to spread the Unix source –
and the Unix way of doing things – when that source was still (at
least intended to be) proprietary. The Linux Core Kernel Commentary
finds itself in a very different environment; the kernel source is,
of course, already widely distributed throughout the world.”
“This is a heavy book, weighing in at 575 pages in a large
format. Of those pages, 415 go toward printing just under 40,000
lines of source from the 2.2.5 kernel; the remaining 160 pages make
up the “commentary” part.“
“The source code listing is pretty much what one would expect it
to be. Numerous source files from the “core” part of the Linux
kernel are printed, all together, with line numbers. One thing the
listing lacks desperately is any sort of guide headers on the
pages. It’s necessary to page backward to the beginning of a source
file to find out which file you are actually looking at.”