A thorough, example-driven introduction to the C programming language with emphasis on C as portable assembly C, more than any other high-level language, provides rich insights into any computer's architectural components and the operating system routines that manage these components. Although C remains an important language for writing applications, it is also the dominant systems modern operating systems are written mostly in C, with assembly language account for the rest. The book's many code examples range from the basics (program and control structures, data types, best coding practices) through the advanced (networking and security, concurrency and parallelism, system libraries, inter-process communication, internationalization).
Martin Kalin has a Ph.D. from Northwestern University and is a professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University. He has co-written a series of books on C and C++ and written a book on Java for programmers. He enjoys commercial programming and has co-developed large distributed systems in process scheduling and product configuration.