Introduction to the Oracle Solaris Developer Documentation

Learning About Development on the Oracle Solaris OS

The various vehicles for getting information about developing applications in the Oracle Solaris OS are:

Man pages – The reference manual (“man”) pages provide syntax and descriptions for commands, functions, structures, and file formats in the Oracle Solaris OS. If you know the name of the item you are seeking information about, type the man command followed by the item name at the command line. Man pages are also available as online documents from the Solaris 10 Reference Manual Collection. To learn how the Oracle Solaris man pages are organized, see Map to the Oracle Solaris OS Man Page Collection.
OS Manuals – A family of programming manuals describes APIs and frameworks in the Oracle Solaris OS. These manuals, which provide the fundamentals about Oracle Solaris technologies, are primarily grouped in the Solaris 10 Software Developer Collection.
Developer tools documentation – Two integrated development environments (IDE) are available for the Oracle Solaris OS: the Oracle Solaris Studio software and the NetBeans IDE.

The Oracle Solaris Studio software provides a rich development environment for developers who are writing software for the Oracle Solaris OS. Included are C, C++, and Fortran compilers, the dbx debugger, and performance analysis tools. See Using the Oracle Solaris Studio Tools for a summary of the Oracle Solaris Studio software.

The NetBeans IDE provides developers with tools for creating professional cross-platform desktop, enterprise, web, and mobile applications. For documentation, see the Documentation, Training & Support area on the NetBeans.org site. For a summary explanation of the NetBeans software, see Using the NetBeans IDE.

An additional set of tools can be used with the Oracle Solaris Studio tools to develop parallel applications designed to run on distributed-memory systems. See Using Oracle Message Passing Toolkit, formerly Sun HPC ClusterTools, for more information.
Sun Developer Network web site – Highlights of the Sun Developer Network (SDN) Oracle Solaris and OpenSolaris Center include the following:
- Learning Solaris OS includes tutorials, training, and demos
- Library includes technical articles, whitepapers, and books
- Tools includes building, performance, and web stack tools
- A center for developers who are new to the Solaris platform
- Opportunity to join the Sun Developer Network community
Mediacast – The Mediacast Sun media sharing web site contains video and slide presentations on many topics. Click a tag or use the Search field to search for Solaris, OpenSolaris, DTrace, ZFS, and other topics.
SunSolve online support documents – SunSolve maintains a knowledge base of short articles that provide solutions for specific issues concerning Sun hardware and software products. See the Support Documents and Knowledge Base web pages at the SunSolve web site. SunSolve also provides patch information and special bulletins.
Oracle University – Instructor-led courses, online courses, white papers, and other information on the Oracle Solaris OS and other technologies are among the resources available at Oracle University. For example, see Solaris under Product Courses > Sun.
Retail books – You can also learn about the Oracle Solaris OS from books published by commercial publishers.

Notable books for Oracle Solaris developers are:
- OpenSolaris Bible by Nicholas A. Solter, Jerry Jelinek, and David Miner; Wiley; February 12, 2009.
- Pro OpenSolaris by Harry Foxwell and Christine Tran; Apress; April 27, 2009.
- Solaris 10 System Administration Essentials by Solaris Engineers; Prentice Hall PTR; November 30, 2009.
- Solaris 10 Security Essentials by Sun Microsystems Security Engineers; Prentice Hall PTR; November 23, 2009.
- Solaris 10 ZFS Essentials by Scott Watanabe; Prentice Hall PTR; January 4, 2010.
- Solaris ZFS Administration Guide; Sun Microsystems; Vervante; 2009.
- Solaris Application Programming by Darryl Gove, Prentice Hall PTR, January 6, 2008.
- Solaris Performance and Tools: DTrace and MDB Techniques for Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris by Richard McDougall, Jim Mauro, and Brendan Gregg, Prentice Hall PTR, July 30, 2006.
- Solaris Internals: Solaris 10 and OpenSolaris Kernel Architecture by Jim Mauro and Richard McDougall, Prentice Hall PTR, July 20, 2006.
- Solaris Systems Programming by Rich Teer, Prentice Hall PTR, August 19, 2004.
- The Java Tutorial, Fourth Edition by Isaac Rabinovitch, Sharon Zakhour, Scott Hommel, Jacob Royal and Thomas Risser, September 29, 2006.
Oracle Solaris 10 OS product literature – For product literature on the Oracle Solaris 10 OS including data sheets, tours, case studies, and white papers, see the Solaris Operating System web site.
Other Sun documentation – The following documentation sources can be useful to developers, although these manuals are less directly involved with Oracle Solaris OS development: