Which tasks to learn and which books to read to become more skilled at Unix/Linux internals? [closed]

Question

I recently interviewed at a major company and did well on programming questions such as:

• "What is the time complexity of quicksort?
• What is the opposite in C of malloc?
• What is the opposite in C++ of new?
• What is the first argument in a Python function?"

However, I couldn't answer many of the networking / operating system questions so I wonder how to fill this gap. I plan to read the book "Operating Systems" by Tanenbaum and I wonder even though SO is not a recommendation engine in this case if you can tell me other pointers or concrete recommendation how to practice linux/unix internals besides using a linux system in most ways I can and studying the aformentioned book?

I read this thread which is basically a duplicate of my questions Recommended reading to better understand unix/linux internals And I therefore have ordered the book "The Unix Programming Environment" even though it is old.

Any other advice / answer / comment? Maybe about

1) which tasks to perform to become more knowledgable about linux / unix internals.

Thanks

Answer 1

One of the best books for learning in depth about Linux is a book called Rute. It is fairly old (last ed. 2001), but is still very useful, although by now some distros will use different systems (e.g. Upstart in Ubuntu):

Rute

Another excellent book is the Debian handbook, which is very useful if you are using Debian or Debian based systems:

Debian Handbook

I have also learned a lot from the Linux Command line book, which is extremely well written and available from linuxcommand.org.

Answer 2

I'm not sure whether this is what you are after. It is a about systems programming, rather than the internals of Linux itself. It's called The Linux Programming Interface: A Linux and UNIX System Programming Handbook and covers everything from the basics of the filesystem to some more complicated stuff on capabilities and threads. Thoroughly recommend it.

Answer 3

I think the best book for Unix/Linux internals is

Unix Operating System by Maurice J. Bach

PDF is available on the Internet.

Answer 4

A combination of UNIX / Linux and programming: The Art of UNIX Programming. Very good book and has extensive information about how and why UNIX works, the way it does and why programs for UNIX are written in the way they are.

The book presents itself as a lecture about "why" and not about "how" and respects this motto.

Answer 5

The book that taught me most about Unix's internals was Advanced Programming in the UNIX environment originally written by W. Richard Stevens and updated by Stephen Rago to include mainly chapters about threading.

I'm assuming you're familiar with C so you won't have any problem following the book at all.