While reading the book, you feel like traveling in the computer world with a smart compass that keeps telling you everything you just need, no more, no less. The authors provide all lab exercises online for those on the self study path and they are easily the most exciting part of the experience which I thoroughly enjoyed. being a good enough student to actually read and consume the textbook material is somewhat new to me, but this book made it easy. It's written for computer science students, and goes into a lot of detail about modern operating systems concepts such as virtual memory, processes, and signals.

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. I had a lot of experience programming before reading this, but the book definitely clarified my thinking on many topics. In 2004, he was awarded the Herbert Simon Award for Teaching Excellence by the CMU School of Computer Science, an award for which the winner is chosen based on a poll of the students. You read a concept, solve a problem or experiment with a program that illustrates it and then move on to the next concept. MasteringEngineering is an online homework, tutorial, and assessment system, designed to improve results through personalized learning.

The book has concrete and easy to follow along examples in C (basic understanding of C is required), which makes the book very practical. Using practical examples and problems the book walks the student through all the hardware and software knowledge that is required to understand how a program comes to life on a computer. The sections on cache here and in Inside The Machine stand head-to-head as the most practical introductions to the topic. 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.

All the chapters are excellent, except maybe chapter 7 on linking and chapter 8 on exceptional control flow. 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. 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. I highly recommend Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective for anyone who feel they need a better grasp of these ideas.The best thing about the book is that it gives an hands on approach with several labs that apply very well the theory into practice.

This is an easy to follow book that covers how computers work from the level of processors up to web servers. While the content is not too hard, the knowledge in here is definitely not attainable from random tutorials here and there on the web. I found the time well-spent in deepening my understanding of how computers actually run programs and why higher-level languages like Python necessarily sacrifice some performance. This book teaches you, throughout all of its chapters in great details what happens when you "run" a program on your computer.Being new in this area of CS, I had a hard time actually assessing whether I got sufficiently around the 'need-to-know' concepts (the answer is probably 'No'). This is an international edition textbook with identical content as the US version and is usually paperback bound instead of hardcover. 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.

However, the programmer interested in these details can easily learn about them with a book like Inside The Machine.

I was not interested in and did not see any benefit for this book to touch on areas of system I/O, network programming and concurrency. It will show you what a marvellous beauty virtual memory is, the program stack, the heap, linking and loading, what really is a process and a thread (not at a surface level, but at a much deeper level) and how a computer system orchestrates your hello world program to print those ascii letters on screen.