Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

I'm in an online book club for this book and I almost dropped out but I started back this week (still early in the book) and I think I'm back in. Not being a systems engineer a lot of this is more in-depth than what I know, but I really like the writing style - it's not afraid to make jokes and be idiosyncratic. It seems interested in describing in basic/simple terms partly because that is a challenge in and of itself - and if you really understand something you should be able to break it down that simply. The section I just read was about creating programs - fork and exec. Not saying I absorbed all of it but it did have this feeling of "oh you're describing something that has subtly guided how I experience computers but that I never realized was operating". That is a fun feeling!

This book is a delight to read! Lots of little jokes and asides to make you feel welcome. I also like the way a lot of the sentences are structured - lots of parentheticals as examples reminders of what they're talking about in a broader sense. I guess maybe that is partly Feynman influence? I've never actually read the physics lectures the title references to check. Still a fun reminder that you can put effort into doing things differently and it can pay off in being useful to people. What have I been reading about? Today it was about the scheduler and how it schedules tasks on the CPU. I loved that it went from a toy model to help you think about it, to gradually introducing the complexities of real-world situations. Really thoughtful way of explaining how a system works.