"Imag­ing you'd sim­ply hold your smart­phone be­sides your PC's mon­i­tor a NFC (near field com­mu­ni­ca­tion) sys­tem in phone and mon­i­tor de­tects the rel­a­tive po­si­tion, and flick the email ed­i­tor over to the PC al­low­ing you to con­tin­ue your ed­it there. Now imag­ine that this hap­pens ab­so­lute­ly trans­par­ent to the pro­grams in­volved, that this is some­thing man­aged by the op­er­at­ing sys­tem. This is where I want to go. Not that cheap ef­fects lol­lipop desk­tops Ubun­tu/Canon­i­cal, In­tel, Red­Hat/Fe­do­ra and Gnome(3) aim for."

"This book is both practical and philosophical. Some parts are aphoristic and general, others will examine specific case studies in Unix development. We will precede or follow general principles and aphorisms with examples that illustrate them: examples drawn not from toy demonstration programs but rather from real working code that is in use every day."