Merusi (a consultant, he also teaches at Rensselaer, Hartford, CT) writes for those who use one system and want to learn the other, those who must integrate the two, and for professional enterprise programmers. The text compares functionality across the board between Windows 95, 98, NT, and 2000 with similar features in Solaris V2.6 and Red Hat Linux Version 6.1. Other topics how to create and manage threads and processes, controlling concurrency, programming for unexpected errors and conditions, various aspects of file systems, memory management functions, networking and communications, and facilities available for security control in Windows. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)