''Software Tools'', by [Brian Kernighan] and P.J.Plauger, Addison-Wesley, 1976,
is an older
book which showed the reader step by step how to build a UNIX-like
environment on any system that supported a decent Fortran compiler,
including almost all the source you needed. By the time you finished
all the exercises, you had [Ratfor], '''roff''', [m4], '''ed''',
[grep], and other tools... the core of the UNIX command-line
environment.

The tools were portable, and implemented a virtual file system on
top of a native file system that allowed the [Unix]-like system to run
on everything from CP/M-80 to Cray systems.

A few years later, ''Software Tools in Pascal'' was released,
achieving the same goal for the next language to be popular.

[RS] made his first steps in C with Jim E. Hendrix's "Small C", which contained a suite of tools modeled closely after Kernighan/Plaugher, on a Z80+ machine. I was most amazed by the simplicity that most tools read from stdin, wrote to stdout, so they could be easily coupled into pipes.
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The USENIX STUG Award [http://www.usenix.org/about/stug.html] is a remnant of the community that
grew up around the tools in the book. (STUG: Software Tools User Group)

''See also:''

   * Software Ptools [http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~copeland/work/ppt.html]
   * STUG Nominations [http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2000-4/nominations.html]
   * In 1998, Tcl won the ‘ACM Software System Award’ and the ‘USENIX Software Tools User Group (STUG) Award’ [http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs2as/cm20168/index.php?page=assessment]

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[Category Book]