alt Hacker News> I’m retired but mentor CS students at two local universities.
> I haven’t had a student in two years that was even remotely interested in ring-0, internals, or really understanding a debugger.
I know quite a lot of such people (even in student age) who are interested in such topics. I really have a feeling that you chose the wrong students at the wrong universities.
Evidence for my point: rather recently, No Starch Press published quite a lot of about such topics - I am rather certain that a publisher knows quite well which kinds of books do or don't sell well at a given time:
- The Book of Debugging https://nostarch.com/book-of-debugging
- The Linux Memory Manager https://nostarch.com/linux-memory-manager
- The Art of 64-Bit Assembly, Volume 2 https://nostarch.com/art-64-bit-assembly-v2
- The Ghidra Book, 2nd Edition https://nostarch.com/ghidra-book-2e
- Building a Debugger https://nostarch.com/building-a-debugger
- Microcontroller Exploits https://nostarch.com/microcontroller-exploits
- System Programming in Linux https://nostarch.com/system-programming-linux
- The Art of ARM Assembly, Volume 1 https://nostarch.com/art-arm-assembly-volume-1
- Getting Started with FPGAs https://nostarch.com/gettingstartedwithfpgas
- The Book of I²C https://nostarch.com/book-i%C2%B2c
Replies
And for some books about Windows system programming:
- Windows Internals, Parts I and II
- Windows 10 System Programming, Parts I and II
- Windows Kernel Programming, Second Edition
- Programming Windows, 5th and 6th Editions
> you chose the wrong students at the wrong universities
I work with Duke University, the University of North Carolina, and Carnegie Mellon.
You don't know that "young engineers" are buying those books. I didn't claim that no one is interested in low-level development. My point is that most younger developers couldn't explain the difference between a mutex and a critical section, or how the OS handles a thread quantum, if their lives depended on it.
I could list a dozen new books on how to build an LLM from scratch. That doesn't mean that most developers understand LLM internals.
As an aside, I love your username. I have a tattoo of Aleph One. ;-)
> System Programming in Linux https://nostarch.com/system-programming-linux
Any ideas how this compares with Kerrisk's The Linux Programming Interface? I've only so much time to read one 1000+ page book...