Programming: an introduction to the profession. In three volumes. Vol.2: Systems and Networks

The book is aimed at people who learn programming on their own; it considers a wide range of issues, including introductory information, basic concepts and techniques of programming, the capabilities of the operating system kernel and the principles of its functioning, programming paradigms. It is supposed to use operating systems of the Unix family (including Linux) as an end-to-end working and training environment; a number of programming languages are considered: Pascal, assembly language (NASM), C, C++, Lisp, Scheme, Prolog, Hope and Tcl. The book includes information about the most important Unix system calls, including those for communication over computer networks; an introducton to the ncurses, FLTK and Tcl/Tk libraries is also given. The second volume ("Systems and Networks") starts with the fourth part, devoted to the C programming language; it also includes parts about basic Unix programming (input/output, process manipulation etc.); computer networking; parallel programming and dealing with shared data; basics of kernel internals.

The portable UNIX programming system (PUPS) and CANTOR: a computational environment for dynamical representation and analysis of complex neurobiological data

Many problems in analytical biology, such as the classification of organisms, the modelling of macromolecules, or the structural analysis of metabolic or neural networks, involve complex relational data. Here, we describe a software environment, the portable UNIX programming system (PUPS), which has been developed to allow efficient computational representation and analysis of such data. The system can also be used as a general development tool for database and classification applications. As the complexity of analytical biology problems may lead to computation times of several days or weeks even on powerful computer hardware, the PUPS environment gives support for persistent computations by providing mechanisms for dynamic interaction and homeostatic protection of processes. Biological objects and their interrelations are also represented in a homeostatic way in PUPS. Object relationships are maintained and updated by the objects themselves, thus providing a flexible, scalable and current data representation. Based on the PUPS environment, we have developed an optimization package, CANTOR, which can be applied to a wide range of relational data and which has been employed in different analyses of neuroanatomical connectivity. The CANTOR package makes use of the PUPS system features by modifying candidate arrangements of objects within the system's database. This restructuring is carried out via optimization algorithms that are based on user–defined cost functions, thus providing flexible and powerful tools for the structural analysis of the database content. The use of stochastic optimization also enables the CANTOR system to deal effectively with incomplete and inconsistent data. Prototypical forms of PUPS and CANTOR have been coded and used successfully in the analysis of anatomical and functional mammalian brain connectivity, involving complex and inconsistent experimental data. In addition, PUPS has been used for solving multivariate engineering optimization problems and to implement the digital identification system (DAISY), a system for the automated classification of biological objects. PUPS is implemented in ANSI–C under the POSIX.1 standard and is to a great extent architecture– and operating–system independent. The software is supported by systems libraries that allow multi–threading (the concurrent processing of several database operations), as well as the distribution of the dynamic data objects and library operations over clusters of computers. These attributes make the system easily scalable, and in principle allow the representation and analysis of arbitrarily large sets of relational data. PUPS and CANTOR are freely distributed (http://www.pups.org.uk) as open–source software under the GNU license agreement.