UET VC’s textbook ranked 1st among best eBooks

LAHORE: The latest book by Prof Dr Syed Mansoor Sarwar, UET Vice-Chancellor, — Unix: The Textbook, (third edition) — has been ranked 1st in Book authority’s ranking of 73 best Unix eBooks of all time and 2nd in the list of 100 best Unix Books of all time.

According to a press release, Dr Sarwar is the only Pakistani who has achieved such a coveted honour. The lists were compiled based on the recommendations by top software engineers: Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Publishers fame), Julia Evans, Garry Tan and James Hong. As featured on CNN, Forbes, and Inc, Bookauthority identifies and rates the best books using dozens of different signals, including public mentions on social media, recommendations by though leaders, user ratings, popularity and sales history. It has the most comprehensive collection of book recommendations from domain experts such as Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Prof Daniel Kahneman, Sheryl Sandberg, and David Allen. To keep its site objective and unbiased, ratings are calculated purely based on data.

The book was published in November 2016 by CRC Press/Taylor & Francis (a subsidiary of Informa), Boca Raton, Florida, USA. The first two edition of the book were published by Addison-Wesley (a subsidiary of Pearson Education), Boston, Massachusetts, USA Informa and Pearson are top-20 ranked publishers in the world.

The Unix operating system was authored in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Labs research center. It is a robust and much safer system compared to other operating systems including Microsoft Windows. In spite of being a 52-year old operating system, it remains extremely important because most of the Internet servers run on Unix and Unix-like operating systems.

Dr Sarwar’s books have been used in over 200 US colleges and universities, including some of the top universities such as University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Arizona, Stevens Tech, University of California at Santa Barbara, and Syracuse University.

These books are also being taught in several other countries including Canada, UK, Belgium, and Australia. The US Navy is also using UNIX: The Textbook, Third Edition for one of its training programmes. The first edition of the book was translated into the Chinese and Spanish languages too. These translations are being used in China, Hong Kong, Spain, and Mexico.