Nice review of Linux Programming By Example on slashdot today. The book goes through the source of the Unix V7 code for the ls program. The second part then delves into processes, etc. I have a similar book at home, Linux Application Development which is quite an old one, but a good book overall. It also covers the make utility in the beginning which I think the Example book should have covered as well.

The author of the review linked to a good article on how there are so many ‘Teach Yourself in 24 hours’ or ‘21 days’ books out there these days. It does indeed take a long time to learn to program well. You have to make a lot of mistakes, fix them, across multiple languages and generally it does take you several years of exposure to become a competent programmer. I do suppose that if you already know 10 languages, you should be able to pick the next one up in 2 weeks or so? I suppose these books do fill that niche.