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Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

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Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#51

Post by sosagain »

brudgers wrote: post #30

Probably not. I say this not to discourage you from writing, but to prompt you to write a book that does something -- a book worthy of fundamental disagreement and passionate debate. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces [1] covers the really interesting parts of the book you are considering, and skips the parts that can't really be given decent treatment: x86 Assembly, C, and writing a toy operating system. Likewise,…

For a mature programmer like you, it probably feels redundant to write a book that iterates concepts you have understood long ago. This book is for beginners. I have notice that many students graduate from University without actually understanding the concepts completely. It's a book I wish had existed when I was an undergraduate student.

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#52

Post by sosagain »

eshvk wrote: post #38

> motivated cs students who want to learn more than what their typical operating system courses has to offer. When I studied at UT, the OS course lets you build an OS. It was brutal. 80 hour per week brutal. But what I took away from the course is not the class notes but really the Prof/TA comments when we used to come up with design issues when we fucked up lower abstraction layers or subtle, really really subtle bu…

>Either you are so vague that people muddle, then google and your book is effectively useless. Or you are so prescriptive that people end up reading a floor plan to build an OS and get squat out of it.

Finding a middle ground is of course key.

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#53

Post by brudgers »

sosagain wrote: post #51
brudgers wrote: post #30

Probably not. I say this not to discourage you from writing, but to prompt you to write a book that does something -- a book worthy of fundamental disagreement and passionate debate. Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces [1] covers the really interesting parts of the book you are considering, and skips the parts that can't really be given decent treatment: x86 Assembly, C, and writing a toy operating system. Likewise,…

For a mature programmer like you, it probably feels redundant to write a book that iterates concepts you have understood long ago. This book is for beginners. I have notice that many students graduate from University without actually understanding the concepts completely. It's a book I wish had existed when I was an undergraduate student.

Though mature, I'm well within the criteria you describe. Perhaps that's why I am a little familiar with what is already available for beginners. The issue for undergrads isn't that resources don't exist, it's that they don't know what exists. Twenty years ago my CS major neighbor turned me on to Mosaic, but had never heard of Dr. Dobbs. And he was a senior. A year ago, I was talking with a CS Junior who knew nothing about what an embedded system was. He only became aware at a job fair. Hadnt heard of YC either, sohe got my copy of Hackers and Painters.

Anyway, the danger you face is that you've cut the scope all the way back to undergraduates and begun to cast it as a traditional textbook. One that has to introduce C and x86 assembly and has to address the practical issues of testing and running a new minimal OS on their development machine [under Windows, OSX, and Linux?]. How much of what you want to write gets left out and how much of what you do write winds up being superficial instead of what you wish you had known?

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#54

Post by dexterchief »

I took some classes with Marc-André Cournoyer (http://classes.codedinc.com/) and really enjoyed the format he used of online video, 4 hours a day for two days.

FWIW, I think what you are thinking of might be a good (better?) fit with that format.

Either way it sounds interesting!

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#55

Post by brudgers »

sosagain wrote: post #52
eshvk wrote: post #38

> motivated cs students who want to learn more than what their typical operating system courses has to offer. When I studied at UT, the OS course lets you build an OS. It was brutal. 80 hour per week brutal. But what I took away from the course is not the class notes but really the Prof/TA comments when we used to come up with design issues when we fucked up lower abstraction layers or subtle, really really subtle bu…

>Either you are so vague that people muddle, then google and your book is effectively useless. Or you are so prescriptive that people end up reading a floor plan to build an OS and get squat out of it. Finding a middle ground is of course key.

I look at the books in my library. The middling one's are more or less reference materials. But the good ones -- On Lisp, JavaScript Allonge, HtDP, or SICP? None are dumbed down. The author is trying to impart all the knowledge that they can impart coherently.

Knuth stands above them all of course. But its cautionary tale is that it's a book about compilers. I'm pretty sure I'll live to see chapter 12, but as it stands today, there are four more chapters to be released before it. Knuth began writing The Art of Computer Programming in 1962.

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#56

Post by galvanist »

aristus wrote: post #20

I am self taught, and after 12 years in industry I took McKusick's kernel class on Saturdays at Berkeley. It kicked my ass and ate up a lot of time, but it was the best thing I could have done to further my knowledge.

sounds useful. how did that work? were you auditing? did you enroll as a student? what was the cost?

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#57

Post by danellis »

The more information about this kind of thing the better, as long as it's well written, but why do you target it at self-taught programmers? Do you assume they know less about the topic than someone who has done a CS course? I'm a self-taught programmer, and I recently wrote myself a small OS for an ARM Cortex MPU (which I need to get around to writing about). Now, I'm no expert in scheduling algorithms, or IPC performance, or various advanced topics, but then neither are most CS graduates. This is a topic nearly everyone can learn from.

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#59

Post by stevekemp »

anupshinde wrote: post #48

I'd be interested. I taught myself to write an OS 10 years back (using floppy disks) and it was PITA. I tried it for fun few months back (just for fun) and even today, I find its not so easy. I would expect it to be < 150 pages, shows me how to write a boot loader "safely" to my USB disk and how to do the other interesting stuff you mentioned post boot - especially interfacing with eth0, wifi, bluetooth (and maybe gp…

I've done low-level coding in the past, hung around on the osdev wiki, and paid a lot of attention to the topic even though I've no real desire to create an OS.

The single biggest piece of advice I'd give to people is _never_ try to write your own bootloader. People have written millions of them, but ultimately grub, etc, have this covered. Writing a boot loader is kinda/sorta fun, I get that, but really it's just a stepping stone which is required to get your _real_ code running.

Reinventing wheels is educational, but a boot loader? It's not really worth the time..

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