What Every C Programmer Should Know About Undefined Behavior” 1, 2, 3 by Chris Lattner, Clang developer 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. It’s cool to find out that a simple goto statement along with conditional instructions ( jmps) are enough to implement a complex loop. Furthermore, Chapter 4 (Processor Architecture) introduces how CPUs work and what instructions make the CPU complete to the extent. 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. Books that describe the fundamentals of computer organization do not dive into the topic from a programmer’s perspective. This book does what its title says, it dives into “computer systems” from “programmer’s perspective”. Almost every programmer is really curious about the inner details of program construction and execution. An ultimate goal for a programmer is to create a computer with bare hands and implement a program without a compiler (sounds kind of crazy, though).

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. 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. PDF / EPUB File Name: Computer_Systems_3rd_Edition_-_Randal_Bryant.pdf, Computer_Systems_3rd_Edition_-_Randal_Bryant.epub Chapter 6 (The Memory Hierarchy) is one of my favorite chapters. 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. The chapter dives into cache memory and data locality (a super important concept for efficient coding). Part II, Running Programs on a System The textbook for the course is Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, Third Edition (also known as CS:APP3e) by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O’Hallaron. Pearson, 2015, ISBN 978-0134092669.Chapter 8 (Exceptional Control Flow), a boring chapter for me, but truly useful for understanding CPU interruptions and process lifecycle in general. The chapter is also useful to understand proper error handling mechanisms.

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.