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System Programming in Linux
book

System Programming in Linux

by Stewart N. Weiss
October 2025
Intermediate to advanced
1048 pages
29h 35m
English
No Starch Press
Content preview from System Programming in Linux

BUNICODE AND UTF-8

Chapter opening image from the book’s cover; shows a sunflower.

Computers store all data as sequences of bits that are essentially numbers. Numbers are used to represent all of the visual symbols that we think of as characters, such as the letters of our alphabets, the digits in our numerals, the various punctuation symbols, and the control codes that affect how and where other symbols are printed. Informally, characters are the smallest representable symbols used in a written language, such as the letters of the Roman alphabet, and a character encoding is an assignment of numbers to a set of characters.

The ASCII character encoding was the most prevalent encoding for more than 40 years. ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0642572230128Errata Page