Book Recommendations

From time to time students ask me for book recommendations. Subsequently my personal top five(+/-) lists for each category (a little bit Linux (kernel) and C biased). I believe these are the books you should read when you are interested in one particular topic:

Computer Architecture

• Processor Microarchitecture: An Implementation Perspective; Antonio Gonzalez and Fernando Latorre and Grigorios Magklis; The title says it all! A book you should probably read after you read all other books in this section. Alexei Starovoitov suggested this book lately and after reading it I must say it is worth every penny.
• Inside the Machine; Jon Stokes; For readers not yet familiar with registers, pipelining or superscalar architectures. If you want to understand how modern CPUs are designed you should start with this book. Furthermore: easy to read!
• Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It?; Paul McKenney; What about this book? It is written from Paul - this should be enough. Everyone not knowing Paul: he is just the brilliant guy contributing the most advanced locking mechanism for the Linux Kernel since a long time. Paul collected all his synchronization knowledge in one 500 page book: locking, RCU, memory barriers, atomic operations, transactional memory and many more. If you read this book and able to answer all “Quick Quizzes” you can call youself a master of synchronization or Paul2! ;-) And, Paul publish his knowledge for free: perfbook
• UNIX Systems for Modern Architectures: Symmetric Multiprocessing and Caching for Kernel Programmers, Curt Schimmel, A book about SMP systems with focus on cache strategies: cache lines, physical and virtual addressed cache lines, memory models, …
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory, Ulrich Drepper, Ulrich wrote this freely available PDF in 2007 but it is still one of the best publication about memory and caches from a programmers perspective. I mirrored the PDF locally cause it seems the paper “start to disappear from the Internet”.
• Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer’s Manuals, Intel, Let’s say it in this way: if your knowledge is below a specific threshold this manual seems complicated and only a few sections are understandable. But the higher your knowledge is the more you will look in this manual. The last open questions you have may be answered there!
• The Unabridged Pentium 4: IA32 Processor Genealogy, Tom Shanley, A huge book about all bits and peaces of a Pentium 4 - a compendium. Anyway, if your budget is limited you can skip this one.

C Programming under Linux/Unix

• The Linux Programming Interface; Michael Kerrisk; Treated as the “new Stevens”, yes this is what I heard. If your are a fresh Linux System programmer or an old-timer: this book provides up-to-date and detailed information about Linux Programming Interface. The book is written by Michael Kerrisk, the person who maintains the Linux man pages. In other words: if there is one guy out there knowing all syscalls and how to use them correctly - then it is probably Michael!
• Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment, W. Richard Stevens and Stephen A. Rago
• Hackers Delight, Henry S. Warren
• Optimizing Compilers for Modern Architectures, Randy Allen und John R. Allen

Network Programming

• Unix Network Programming: The Sockets Networking API, W. Richard Stevens and Bill Fenner and Andrew M. Rudoff
• Network Programming with Perl, Lincoln D. Stein

Network Protocols

• TCP/IP Illustrated - Volume 1 and 2, Richard Stevens
• Network Algorithmics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Designing Fast Networked Devices, George Varghese
• Network Routing: Algorithms, Protocols, and Architectures, Deepankar Medhi
• BGP: Building Reliable Networks with the Border Gateway Protocol, Iljitsch van Beijnum

Linux Kernel and Userspace Programming

• Linux Kernel in a Nutshell, Greg Kroah-Hartman
• Linux Device Drivers (3rd Edition) Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini and Greg Kroah-Hartman
• Understanding the Linux Kernel, Daniel P. Bovet and Marco Cesati
• Linux Kernel Development, Robert Love
• The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, Marshall Kirk McKusick and George V. Neville-Neil (FreeBSD but worth to read it - Tip!)