In addition to source code and Internet resources, a number of good books cover some of the topics discussed in this book. The following list represents my personal anthology in the field. The books I list here either document software features of Unix systems or describe interesting hardware topics. I won’t name any books about the PC architecture, as there are too many of them. Unfortunately, I also can’t suggest any book about the Sparc architecture, as I found none. If you need information, I’m pretty sure a quick search through the Web will fill the gap.
Bach, Maurics. The Design of the Unix Operating System. Prentice Hall. 1986.
This book, though quite old, covers all the issues related to Unix implementations. It has been the main source of inpiration for Linus to write the first Linux versions.
Beck, Michael. Linux Kernel Internals. Addison-WEsley. 1992.
This book concentrates on the internal data structures and algorithms of Linux; you’ll like it if you appreciate detailed descriptions. The first edition treated version 1.2; I don’t know how far through later versions the new edition has moved. Version 2.0 and later are quite different from 1.2 in their internal details.
Stevens, Richard. Advanced Programming in The Unix Environment. Prentice Hall. 1990.
Every detail of Unix system calls is described herein. The book is a good companion when implementing advanced features in the device methods. Any conceivable doubt about Unix semantics can be solved by referring to this book.
Stevens, Richard. Unix Network Programming. Prentice Hall. 1990.
As you might imagine, this book is a high-quality reference about networking issues. It matches “Advanced Programming” in both quality and coverage of the subject matter. The books is full of source code to test every bit of user-space networking.
Comer, Douglas, and Stevens, David. Internetworking with TCP/IP Vols I, II and III. Prentice Hall. 1991.
This heavy collection of networking information is a complete tutorial about everything in the Internet field. The books describe the suite of Internet Protocols and their implementation.
Shanley, Tom, and Anderson, Don. PCI Sytem Architecture. Addison-Wesley. 1995.
This book thoroughly describes the PCI bus and its interface standard. You’ll find similar “System Architecture” titles for most of the hardware topics, all by the same authors. All these books are very interesting, although somehow PC-biased. This volume about PCI is the one I liked best. I disliked at least one of the books, but a careful analysis revealed that the book is good and just describes a bad architecture.
Digital Semiconductor. Alpha AXP Architecture Handbook. Digital Semiconductor. 1994.
This book and the “Alpha AXP Reference Manual” are available for free from Digital Semiconductor. They describes the machine language of the Alpha processors and the underlying design issues that have been dealt with. The order number for this book is EC-QD2KA-TE.
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