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Michael Kerrisk is a freelance trainer, writer, and consultant who has been using and programming on UNIX systems since 1987. He is the author of The Linux Programming Interface , a book widely-acclaimed as the definitive work on Linux system programming. As a contributor and maintainer of the Linux man-pages project , he has been actively involved in the Linux community for more than 20 years, performing testing, design review, and documentation of Linux APIs. (He also wrote many of the manual pages that are consulted on a daily basis by thousands of programmers around the world.) Widely recognized for his Linux work, Michael is a regularly invited to present at Linux and free software conferences. A sought-after teacher, he conducts training courses for companies and governments across Europe and elsewhere around the world. Michael holds a BSc(Hons) degree in Computer Science as well as a BA in Psychology and Art History, both from the University of Canterbury (NZ). My exposure to UNIX came in bits and pieces; I first encountered UNIX culture a few years before I actually met UNIX itself. While I was doing my first (Computer Science) degree, I was introduced to regular expressions via chef, a prettied-up version of the early UNIX editor, ed, which had been ported to the PRIMOS system at the university . (At the time, PRIME Computer was a significant manufacturer of minicomputer hardware, and a notable competitor to Digital .) At the same time, I met Robert Biddle , then a graduate student fresh from the University of Waterloo . Waterloo had a fairly famous Computer Science department (it was the home of WATFOR , a popular FORTRAN compiler of the day), and was much closer to the UNIX wave that was then sweeping academia than New Zealand computer science departments, where UNIX had still to make a widespread appearance. Robert told intriguing stories of UNIX, C, and Ratfor . The next step on the way to meeting UNIX came when I met emacs after taking up a position teaching Computing at the University of ...