Kermit Books

Frank da Cruz
February 8, 2016

Also see:  [Online books] [Kermit Bibliography]

Kermit books and manuals were published in English and several other languages between 1987 and 2003. They are now out of print but some are still available at Amazon.com (SEARCH), some of them in Kindle e-book editions. CLICK HERE to see a Kermit bibliography. To see if Amazon.com (USA) has any of the German, French, or Japanese Kermit books, CLICK HERE. Also try Bookfinder and EBay.

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Using C-Kermit

Using C-Kermit, 2nd edition, is still recommended for serious users of C-Kermit (for Unix and VMS) and of Kermit 95 (for Microsoft Windows) (casual users can find online tutorials HERE and HERE, and K95 users can find the manual for its Windows-specific features HERE). The book explains all the basics of Kermit's operation and command language, including the syntax of the block structured scripting language that was introduced with C-Kermit 6.0 and is the form still used today. It's full of tables (notably of 8-bit Roman, Cyrillic, and Hebrew character sets), tutorials (notably serial data communications), and all sorts of reference material, plus an extensive index.

Other Kermit Books

The other books are out of print but you can still find some of them at Amazon.com and elsewhere:

Kermit: A File Transfer Protocol from Amazon.com (REVIEWS). (the original Kermit book, 1987, in print for 15 years - includes Kermit protocol specification). Foreword by Donald Knuth; illustrated by George Ulrich. A Russian edition was in preparation at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union by Akademia Nauk (SEE SAMPLE CHAPTER). This book is now available online as a PDF file, CLICK HERE to see it.

Using MS-DOS Kermit from Amazon.com (REVIEWS). (Kermit software for DOS - includes its own built-in TCP/IP stack) Also published in French and German, plus a Japanese volume about the NEC pc9801 version of MS-DOS Kermit. This book is now available online as a PDF file, CLICK HERE to see it.

Note: MS-DOS Kermit is for DOS and for Windows 3.11 and earlier. For Windows 95 and later (98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7, 8, 10, etc) the software is Kermit 95, which comes with its own online manual.

Notes about the books

The English-language Kermit books were published by Digital Press, the publishing house of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). After DEC disappeared, the Digital Press imprint passed to Butterworth-Heinemann and from there to Reed-Elsevier, or simply Elsevier. The production quality is high, with thorough peer review, copy editing, and professional design. Translations were published in Germany and France, licensed from Digital Press to Verlag Heinz Heise and Heinz Schiefer & cie. The English versions were typeset by the authors using the Scribe documentation preparation system, a remarkable improvement over its successors (as Mark Crispin might say), and input using the EMACS text editor (both before and after it became GNU EMACS) on the DECSYSTEM-20 and later on various Unix platforms.

The Kermit 95 book was published in 1995 along with Kermit 95 itself, and packaged in a big box with the software diskettes and a copy of Using C-Kermit, first edition, total weight several pounds. The cover of the Kermit 95 book is, well, horrible. Our sketch for a design was given to a designer who evidently favored Hot Wheels and Dungeons and Dragons. We were thinking more VW Beetle or Mini Cooper, exploring a friendlier landscape, not the Mountains of Doom (after the first release of K95, the manual was online only). Authors rarely get approval of book covers, and worse, even of the titles. The title of the first Kermit book should have been The Kermit File Transfer Protocol but the designer changed it for, well, design reasons. By the way, the cover of that book shows an IBM PC/AT on the left, connected to a DEC VAX, which is accessed by a DEC Rainbow, which was DEC's answer to the IBM PC in the early 1980s.

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Kermit Manuals / kermit@kermitproject.org / 2011-09-27 / 2016-02-10 / 2016-12-10 / 2020-06-26