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Dive into Systems is a free, online textbook that serves as a gentle introduction to computer systems, computer organization, and parallel computing. The book is intended for an audience that has only a CS1 background. It guides readers through a vertical slice of a computer to develop an understanding of a variety of systems topics, including:

how a computer runs a program, from a program expressed in a high-level language to low-level binary representation and circuits

programming in C and Assembly, assuming a CS1 background

introduction to operating systems and the systems costs that affect program performance (the memory hierarchy, caching, and code optimization)

introduction to parallel computing with shared memory and pthreads

Microkernels—long discarded as unacceptable because of their lower performance compared with monolithic kernels—might be making a comeback in operating systems due to their potentially higher reliability, which many researchers now regard as more impo

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