Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective

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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.

Many Git commands accept both tag and branch names, so creating this branch may cause unexpected behavior. This book strives to create programmers who understand all elements of computer systems and will be able to engage in any application of the field–from fixing faulty software, to writing more capable programs, to avoiding common flaws. 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. It’s cool to find out that a simple goto statement along with conditional instructions ( jmps) are enough to implement a complex loop. Chapter 3 (Machine Level Representation of Programs) shows the reader how would a [simple] C program translate to machine code.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. Books that describe the fundamentals of computer organization do not dive into the topic from a programmer’s perspective. Though there are great books on network programming and a single chapter won’t be enough to master network programming on a professional level, this chapter would be a great introduction to the topic in general.

The textbook for the course is Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective, Third Edition (also known as CS:APP3e) by Randal E. 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. It doesn’t matter if you are a frontend JS developer, or a backend Java developer, or an Android developer, the book will help you to understand the low-level details of your programs and also will be a good help in preparing to programming interviews. As a summary, the book is a must read for every programmer to master fundamentals of computer systems. 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.Chapter 12 (Concurrent Programming) is again, a good introduction to concurrent programming and multithreading in general. The chapter dives into cache memory and data locality (a super important concept for efficient coding). Here is a quick description and cover image of book Computer Systems, 3rd Edition written by Randal Bryant which was published in . Spanning across computer science themes such as hardware architecture, the operating system, and systems software, the Third Edition serves as a comprehensive introduction to programming. This book does what its title says, it dives into “computer systems” from “programmer’s perspective”.