The vast majority of Linux systems are reasonably well documented with respect to the system programming interfaces and standard utilities. This is true because, since the earliest UNIX systems, programmers have been encouraged to supply a manual page with their applications. These manual pages, which are sometimes provided in a printed form, are invariably available [...]
One disadvantage of static libraries is that when we run many applications at the same time and they all use functions from the same library, we may end up with many copies of the same functions in memory and indeed many copies in the program files themselves. This can consume a large amount of valuable [...]
The simplest form of library is just a collection of object files kept together in a ready-to-use form. When a program needs to use a function stored in the library, it includes a header file that declares the function. The compiler and linker take care of combining the program code and the library into a [...]
Libraries are collections of precompiled functions that have been written to be reusable. Typically, they consist of sets of related functions to perform a common task. Examples include libraries of screen-handling functions (the curses and ncurses libraries) and database access routines (the dbm library).
Standard system libraries are usually stored in /lib and /usr/lib. The C [...]
For programming in C and other languages, we need header files to provide definitions of constants and declarations for system and library function calls. For C, these are almost always located in /usr/include and subdirectories thereof. You can normally find header files that depend on the particular incarnation of Linux that you are running in [...]