I firmly believe that you can’t understand what you’re doing unless you comprehend where it came from; I think assembly and C courses should be absolutely mandatory.

By the way, I wonder how Chrome shakes up opinions given above :-)

I read _Lion’s Notes on Unix_, which is pretty dated but still a good read. Also, Kernighan and Plauger’s _Software Tools_.  I enjoyed these, but they’re quite old.  We’re not on PDP-11s any more.

Modern stuff: Bits of the Linux kernel, probably. 4.x bsd Unix sources are better, because there’s a good “implementation of” book by Mckusick, et al, on the internals.

Books like _Apache Server Commentary_ are pretty good, too. I think there were others in this series as well (_The Linux Core Kernel Commentary_).

Knuth’s “Literate Programming” books (e.g., _The Stanford Graphbase_, and _TeX: The Program_) are okay, but you’ll not encounter this in industry.

At work: Walk through some code with a cow-orker. Read it first, make notes, and then run through it “paragraph by paragraph,” paraphrasing to your cow-orker what the code is doing, blow-by-blow. It was amazing how much this has helped my understanding of complex system; something about being on the spot with another person.

@Landon – Slightly offtopic here: I have a question. Every single person who I’ve read/heard speak on the subject of developing programming skill and knowledge agrees that, in addition to programming and reading about programming, you should examine other code in a thorough manner. I can find lots of suggestions for which books to look at, and if I look real hard, I can find particular problems recommended for enlightening, but what programs should someone look at, when they’re ready to start trying to grok actual, production code?

The whole process blew his mind.

After Musenki, he went to another linux hardware startup (agenda, who built a PDA).

I’m not here to troll (Oops I shouldn’t have say it, you’re gonna think I am) but my colleages and I have the (bad) habbit to troll about the very subject of this article. In the web startup I work for, we have a division full of C/C++ guys who program what we web developers call “heavy softwares”. Every time we talk about the languages we use, they start to rent the absence (not true but still) of variable types in PHP and JS.

Every time I hear them rent, I only think about two things :
- since JS and PHP are written with C, it’s a little bit the C community’s fault that this languages commit these “sins”.
- thank God (or whoever you want) there is guys like me who don’t know C, Fortran, Lisp or I don’t know what because they’re will be no web applications whatsoever or they will be delivered for twice the time.

You can do pretty much everything with interpreted languages (except OSs, you’re really right about that) and you can do everything with compiled languages but often for twice the price.

I’ll finish with two short examples of what I’m saying.

- This week, I had to add quotes in some 200 XML files almost every two lines. XML is evil, more if it’s to talk to a C application like in this case.
It took me 15 lines of codes (written in about 15 minutes) and a simple regular expression in PHP to do the job. I didn’t even have to launch my browser, just launched the script with a command line. A colleague of mine told me it would have required twice the work to do it in C.

- Last month, I gave the Adobe AIR runtime a try. With only JS, CSS and HTML and a well known video Flash player library (and basic SQL to store some local data) talking in JSON with a good server API (written in PHP), I wrote a video player wich installs himself in “one” click, automatically updates itself when I publish a new version and “only” use 40Mb of RAM and some 5% of CPU when playing a video.
It took me 15 hours, half of it trying to understand the shitty Adobe documentation for AIR. It’s doable with C but for how much time (given you use VLC or something like that to play the FLV videos).

On a complete different note, I love this blog, I admire guys like you who add to deal with “challenging” hardware (almost like browsers are challenging plateforms to write for). Keep the good work sir.

Helpful Answer
I don’t think you can really answer that question. I used to think the Perl was for obscurantist posers, but I actually worked on a project that used Perl and it was quite OK. For a variety of fairly horrible reasons we needed to generate code and parse. And the guy that wrote the Perl did it in quite C like way.

Of course Perl being Perl doesn’t have civilized things like function prototypes or strong typing so we had to be a bit careful about passing arrays around. But I don’t think you can say that people will necessarily be ruined by writing in a scripting language.

That said, I’ve always enjoyed C and C++, used as someone else put it as C with classes, not “look I can find a use for operator overloading”. Though actually I think smart pointers and using are OK too. You have a destructor that will be called when something goes out of scope, why not use that feature. But it is possible to write awful code in C++ if you try to use all the features to show what a genius you are, just like it is possible to write awful code in Perl if you try to be terse. Or assembler if you try to be clever.

But it’s possible to right stuff that is a joy to read in C++, Perl, Assembler or even English.

I think the lesson is don’t try to be a god when you code. Write code that you’d be happy to go in and change on your first day at a new job.

But I think to really understand what is going on you need to be familiar with C/C++. And also know how to debug those languages in assembler on the machine you work on.

Unhelpful Answer
tl;dr
Mu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)
(That’s hacker God talk for “your question has no answer, n00b”)

That it runs as a stand alone O/S on a broad swathe of hardware (embedded and upwards) as well as in a browser plug-in helps considerably.

http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/

Agree with above – more Atari stories please!

Cheers,
Julian F