Recommended books for building a shell/BBS Server [closed]

There is a book about programming unix shells! written by none other than Axel Tobias-Schreiner, illustrious author of ooc.pdf, The "Object-Oriented C" PDF (Google it, but don't forget his name!).

It's called "Using C with Curses, Lex and Yacc: Building a Window Shell for Unix System V", Prentice Hall, 1990; and it really should be considered Part 3 of the saga begun in K&R "The C Programming Language", and continued in the second half of K&P "The UNIX Programming Environment".

The shell the book describes is a rogue-style "window system" that works inside the terminal (using curses), it includes a text-file viewer, and a command-language interpreter that runs commands inside of these "windows". The command language uses lex and yacc to implement the lexer/parser. So the book serves as an introduction to doing such things, a large literate program in C, and goldmine of snippets for using curses, complicated options processing, and implementing a programming language using the much-touted standard unix tools.

I've never seen a book about programming of shells, although I'd be happy to find out that such a thing exists.

But really, isn't programming a shell basically a list of features that you'll implement AND the order of evaluation of how interpret the users input? You can see a good write-up on order of evaluation in 'Classic Shell Programming', Robbins and Beebe AND in 'C Shell Field Guide' (the Andersons) and possibly others.

Of course, you would learn a lot by digging in on the available source codes for shells, bash, z shell, ksh.

Sorry, I don't have any ideas about the BBS server part of your question. As you found the SAMS book helpful, I'd recommend looking at the W. Richard Stevens' Network Programming Series of books, which is 99% Unix network programming and maybe not what you want.

(Finally, consider changing out your recommendation tag for bash or zsh, as many regular contributors at S.O. check for new questions by searching on 'their' tags. The people that can answer your question better may not be reading it)

I hope this helps.