About This Book

This ‘book’ is about using libuv as a high performance evented I/O library which offers the same API on Windows and Unix.

It is meant to cover the main areas of libuv, but is not a comprehensive reference discussing every function and data structure. The official libuv documentation may be consulted for full details.

This book is still a work in progress, so sections may be incomplete, but I hope you will enjoy it as it grows.

Who this book is for

If you are reading this book, you are either:

1) a systems programmer, creating low-level programs such as daemons or network services and clients. You have found that the event loop approach is well suited for your application and decided to use libuv. 2) a node.js module writer, who wants to wrap platform APIs written in C or C++ with a set of (a)synchronous APIs that are exposed to JavaScript. You will use libuv purely in the context of node.js. For this you will require some other resources as the book does not cover parts specific to v8/node.js.

This book assumes that you are comfortable with the C programming language.

Code

All the code from this book is included as part of the source of the book on Github (code/ folder). Clone, then build libuv:

cd libuv
./autogen.sh
./configure
make

There is no need to make install. To build the examples run make in the code/ directory.