Computer Science from the Bottom Up

Livro digital

Título:
Computer Science from the Bottom Up

Autor:
Ian Wienand

Categoria:
Tecnologia > DevOps

Doador:
Raffaello D. N.

Sinopse:
Most computer science courses teach you to drive — this book opens the hood and hands you the wrench. Starting from binary representation and working upward through CPU architecture, the operating system kernel, and the toolchain that transforms source code into running processes, it builds understanding from the silicon to the shell. The journey begins with number representation, boolean logic, and C type systems before advancing through CPU internals — pipelining, branch prediction, cache hierarchies, and SMP/NUMA topologies. From there it maps the operating system's role in abstracting hardware, managing processes through fork/exec, scheduling tasks, and implementing virtual memory with page tables and TLB hardware. Later chapters on the compilation toolchain, ELF binary format, and dynamic linking reveal exactly how code becomes a running process — including deep dives into the Global Offset Table and Procedure Lookup Table that make shared libraries work. Unlike conventional textbooks that present computer science as abstract theory, this book anchors every concept in the concrete reality of Linux, using real assembly output, readelf dumps, and kernel source excerpts as its primary teaching tools. It covers both x86-64 and Itanium architectures at the register level, making it uniquely valuable for engineers who need to debug at the system boundary. Readers emerge not just knowing what an operating system does, but understanding — with working code — how it does it.