Rating: 

I look for this subject for some time now and I was enthusiastic when I saw the title in the list of Linux books. However reading the description of the book, words like C# or PHP brought me down at the ground level. I would have expected to read IPC, socket, thread,... These keywords are cruelly missing from the content of this book. I downloaded the Chapter IV, "Advanced File I/O" and my first impression got a strong confirmation. From what I saw in this fourth chapter this book is a gathering of man pages and raw, unexplained examples from the Net. A very unfortunate and hasty tentative to fill out a hole in the Linux literature. In my opinion this book will rather confuse the reader than enlighten.

If you want a good book about the System Programming buy rather the second edition of "Advanced UNIX Programming" written by Marc J. Rochkind and published by Addison-Wesley (sorry O'Reilly). It is not targeted at Linux but Linux is UNIX and the book covers well 99% of Linux System Programming.