Approach in the Book

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The contents of this book are selected carefully in order to make it unique in the market and send the following message to the reader community:

• Linux is not limited to game programming and entertainment alone; it is a fully functional operating system that works as a server and a desktop client. The book certainly will be useful for a variety of reader communities—those who are Microsoft Windows-based programmers and are considering exploring the Linux platform for a career; those who are managers at Enterprises but do not know of the capabilities and available industry support for this platform; those who are traditional UNIX professionals and want to know how different (or similar) Linux is to UNIX; and those who are Linux professionals typically used to working with open source software and want to know what kind of Enterprise support is available for this platform. The book might also be useful as a curriculum for educational institutions to use in introducing Linux as an Enterprise-class operating system.

• Linux enjoys the full support of the industry from major players such as IBM, Borland, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and so on. These vendors ported a number of their respective flagship products to the Linux platform. The cost and licensing terms of these software products differ among these vendors; however, the mere availability and stable support options should be viewed as a positive by the Enterprise community.

• One of the main concerns that many Enterprise managers have today is whether Linux will get as much support from the industry as the traditional UNIX and Microsoft Windows enjoy. Although the primary foundation of Linux is from the open source organizations, this book is focused on discussing the Enterprise-level commercial tools available for development and identifies the different vendors and their software tools primarily intended for Enterprise development. The simple reason for this is so that Enterprises can determine the kind of vendor support this platform is able to provide when deciding to migrate or considering migration to Linux.

As mentioned earlier, the Linux operating system is packaged for distribution by a number of vendors, such as Red Hat, SuSE, MandrakeSoft, Turbo Linux, Debian Linux, and so on. This book primarily focuses on discussing topics with specific mention to Red Hat Linux (8.0 and 9.0) and SuSE Linux (8.1 and 8.2) because these are the most prominent distributions. Other Linux distributions are not discussed because it is not practical to build and test examples across several platforms. The most recent versions of the Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux (at the time of writing this book) are those mentioned above in parentheses. Maximum care has been taken to ensure that the examples built in the book are compiled well with the respective tools on the specified platforms and run appropriately on these platforms. However, the discussion may also be useful for other Linux distributions not discussed here, and the examples may also run well; the readers are encouraged to test the programs on the particular Linux distribution of their choice.

The content of the book is focused on three main concepts; object-oriented programming, portable applications, and Enterprise-class application development. The core object-oriented programming model is discussed, as employed by different object-oriented languages such as C++, Java, and Borland Delphi™. C/C++ is the strength of core Linux, while a number of new projects are coming on the Java platform. In addition to these, Borland Software Corporation has ported its prominent Delphi product to Linux. Delphi is very well known in the Windows programming world and is an implementation of the Object Pascal language. A strong feature presented in this book is portability of applications between Windows and Linux. As mentioned earlier, the goal of this book is not to discuss the merits and demerits of different operating systems; it is intended primarily to make a strong presentation to the user community about the availability of this Enterprise-class operating system. Many Enterprises may be interested in knowing how Linux may be used to build portable applications that can be migrated to Windows, or vice versa. If Linux is used as the primary development platform, then the applications built on this platform may be migrated later on to Windows or UNIX. The tools discussed in the book are primarily intended for building portable applications across Windows and Linux. These tools are very powerful and are developed and supported by prominent vendors in the software industry.

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