This book explains the important and enduring concepts underlying all computer systems, and shows the concrete ways that these ideas affect the correctness, performance, and utility of application programs.

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. One of the strengths of the book is its use of C programming language to illustrate the concepts being presented. Together with Professor O’Hallaron, he developed the course 15-213, Introduction to Computer Systems, at Carnegie Mellon that is the basis for this book.being a good enough student to actually read and consume the textbook material is somewhat new to me, but this book made it easy. The sections on cache here and in Inside The Machine stand head-to-head as the most practical introductions to the topic. This actually did a lot for me, but I had to put many, many hours and days into it to get just the overarching concepts.

He spent three years as an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, and has been on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon since 1984.I read (by read, I mean read about 2/3 of the chapters, worked most in-chapter exercises, and completed one lab) this book as a largely self-taught software engineer and found the explanations of computer systems both clear and nuanced. His current work focuses on the notion of autograding, that is, programs that evaluate the quality of other programs.