Textbook of Linux

b. 1942, Toronto — Bell Labs researcher; Princeton CS professor; co-author of K&R

Also known as: Kernighan

Brian Wilson Kernighan was the "K" in the awk language (with Aho and Weinberger), in the book K&R The C Programming Language (with Dennis Ritchie), and in the influential texts The Unix Programming Environment (with Rob Pike) and The Practice of Programming. He was at Bell Labs from 1969 to 2000, overlapping and collaborating with the entire original Unix group, though — with characteristic modesty — he disclaims being a "co-author" of Unix itself.

Kernighan is a gifted writer, and much of what ordinary programmers know about Unix, C, and the philosophy of small, composable tools comes through his books. The line "The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it" opens K&R and has been quoted by every programming book since. His later textbooks, including D is for Digital and Millions, Billions, Zillions, teach programming and numeracy to non-specialists.

He has been a professor in the Princeton CS department since 2000 and still teaches undergraduates.