Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective

Product Information

Chapter 12 (Concurrent Programming) is again, a good introduction to concurrent programming and multithreading in general. However, almost from the beginning, this book starts with a simple C program and shows how it’s compiled and then translated into machine code.

Written from the programmer’s perspective, this book strives to teach readers how understanding basic elements of computer systems and executing real practice can lead them to create better programs. Chapter 2 (Representing and Manipulating Information) tells about representing and manipulating information.Almost every programmer is really curious about the inner details of program construction and execution.

Chapter 5 (Optimizing Program Performance) is a perfect resource for those programmers who are curious about the actual implementation of primitive constructs such as conditional statements and loops. If you’ve ever wondered about the details of an executable file loading into memory and the CPU instructions that actually execute the program, this book is for you.

Here is a quick description and cover image of book Computer Systems, 3rd Edition written by Randal Bryant which was published in .

This chapter is good as a supplementary chapter, understanding the low-level details of file creation/manipulation, is definitely a great addition to your skills as a programmer. Furthermore, Chapter 4 (Processor Architecture) introduces how CPUs work and what instructions make the CPU complete to the extent. This book does what its title says, it dives into “computer systems” from “programmer’s perspective”.The chapter discusses a Y86 processor family as some “generic” way to tell about Intel x86 family without actually mentioning Intel as much as it will sound like an advertisement. This book focuses on systems that execute an x86-64 machine code, and recommends that programmers have access to a Linux system for this course. As a summary, the book is a must read for every programmer to master fundamentals of computer systems. Understanding virtual memory is almost the same as understanding how memory allocation/deallocation works, what is garbage collection, how are addresses translated from virtual to physical and so on.

Chapter 1 (A Tour of Computer Systems) of the book is a regular introduction to the history of computers and their organization.The first chapters of the book are almost the same as other “computer organization” books, they tell us the story of computers, introduce to binary systems and so on. Many Git commands accept both tag and branch names, so creating this branch may cause unexpected behavior. Understanding the structure of computer memory along with the difference between the main memory and CPU cache (and others) is a topic that lays upon any successful project development. Chapter 8 (Exceptional Control Flow), a boring chapter for me, but truly useful for understanding CPU interruptions and process lifecycle in general. The chapter dives into cache memory and data locality (a super important concept for efficient coding).