15-412 Recommended Readings

Recommended readings

We are providing references to some books, papers and sites that you might find interesting or helpful. These won't "be on the test", but the books and papers might save you hours of painful work fixing bugs or redoing bad designs.

• Movies
  • The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk
  • The Princess Bride
  • The Thirteenth Floor
• Books
  • Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg
  • Kim Zetter's Countdown to Zero Day
  • Michael Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning
  • Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine
  • Fred Brooks' Mythical Man-Month
  • Rob Pike and Brian Kernigan's The Practice of Programming . Not strictly about systems programming, but a good collection of practices for for those thinking about writing non-trivial, robust programs.
• Papers
  • Rob Pike's polemic Systems Software Research is Irrelevant
  • Butler Lampson's Hints for Computer System Design
  • Saltzer, Reed and Clark's End-to-End Arguments in System Design (pdf)
• Websites
  • Linux kernel
  • ucLinux (for embedded systems)
  • LinuxDevices.com - a clearinghouse of information about embedded Linux
  • Plan 9
    Plan 9 from Bell Labs (PDF) - A good introduction to Plan 9 (a little old but still relevant).
  • eCos (also the spin-off company eCosCentric )

[Last modified Monday December 30, 2019]