HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

These books are good, especially the last one by Stevens.

Three things helped me a lot to learn more about systems programming:

(1) the reading of existing systems code, especially (i) from a book called Dr Dobb's C-Tools, which includes a C compiler, assembler and linker as well as many command line tools and (ii) the Minix source code. It was the code in this book rather than K&R or Stevens that let me "get" systems programming because I needed to see the bigger picture, and many books only show small code snippets.

(2) the study of other people code; if yo; au have access to a C guru, it's really helpful to just peek over their shoulders for a couple of hours as they implement a new module and then debug it (thanks, Gero and Rolf!) - thankfully, there is a new trend of people recording coding sessions and putting them on YouTube, so more people out there can benefit from experienced hackers e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-7VQwWo2Tg . And, of course,

(3) implementing a non-trivial low-level component. For me, this was having to implement the buffer management of a relational database management system in C from scratch as an exercise in my undergraduate degree (we were given 6 weeks, but not full-time, as lectures were going on at the same time). This course, Systems Programming II, was as beneficial as it was gruesome, but I'm grateful to excellent line-by-line pencilled feedback of one tutor that read the complete code and commented every missing return value check etc.