Most nontrivial programs involve some form of IPC or Interprocess Communication. This is a natural effect of the design principle that the better approach is to design an application as a group of small pieces that communicate with each other, instead of designing one huge monolithic program. This book describes four different forms of IPC in detail:
1. message passing (pipes, FIFOs, and message queues),
2. synchronization (mutexes, condition variables, read-write locks, file and record locks, and semaphores),
3. shared memory (anonymous and named), and
4. remote procedure calls (Solaris doors and Sun RPC).