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Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier and Cryptography Engineering by Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier and Tadayoshi Kohno are definitely a bit old (published in 1993 and 2010!), but great resources nonetheless.
I consulted these two books (among many, many other resources) many times while writing Encryption with JavaScript — Part 1 and Encryption with JavaScript — Part 2 (and the ever-upcoming part 3).
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This absolute beauty of a book walks you through understanding and building a CPU, all the way from relays, vacuum tubes and transistors, and eventually implementing [a model of] the legendary Intel 8080.
It requires almost no previous knowledge and is extremely entertaining. I can't recommend it enough.
On this topic I also highly recommend Ben Eater's Building an 8-bit breadboard computer!.
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Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier and Cryptography Engineering by Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier and Tadayoshi Kohno are definitely a bit old (published in 1993 and 2010!), but great resources nonetheless.
I consulted these two books (among many, many other resources) many times while writing Encryption with JavaScript — Part 1 and Encryption with JavaScript — Part 2 (and the ever-upcoming part 3).
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Fabien Sanglard deserves his own section here. He published 3 amazing, beautiful books: Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D, Game Engine Black Book: DOOM and The Book of CP-System.
I didn't read these books — I devoured them.
The first two cover the history of idSoftware, including some fun facts about John Carmack, John Romero and other members of the company; and then dig deep into the software of Wolfestein 3D and DOOM, the two games that completely revolutionized 3D graphics in PCs and the First Person Shooter genre.
Book of CP-System covers the history, software and hardware of Capcom's famous arcade machines and their games.
You can download them for free as PDFs or buy them from Amazon, TheBookPatch and PlayStore.
He also accepts donations.
- Get Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D,2nd Edition
- Get Game Engine Black Book: DOOM
- Get The Book of CP-System
If you like these, there's a book that is, in a way, closely related: Michael Abrash' Graphics Programming Black Book — for free at GitHub.
Verbatim from Sanglard's Wolfestein 3D book:
In the early 90s, Michael Abrash’s writings were one of the rare sources of high quality information when it came to computer graphics and assembly programming.
He published two highly regarded books ("Zen of Assembly Language" in 1990 and "Zen of Code Optimization" in 1994) but it is through his column "Ramblings in Realtime" published monthly in Dr. Dobb’s Journal that he achieved notoriety.
In 1997 most of Michael Abrash’s work plus new articles about the Quake engine were compiled into the Graphics Programming Black Book. The title and dimension of this book are an homage to Mr Abrash’s masterpiece.
Many game programmers of that era, including John Carmack, learned a few techniques from Michael Abrash.
Most of these tricks have little to no value in a world of vertex and fragment shaders, but their historical significance cannot be overstated.
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Fabien Sanglard deserves his own section here. He published 3 amazing, beautiful books: Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D, Game Engine Black Book: DOOM and The Book of CP-System.
I didn't read these books — I devoured them.
The first two cover the history of idSoftware, including some fun facts about John Carmack, John Romero and other members of the company; and then dig deep into the software of Wolfestein 3D and DOOM, the two games that completely revolutionized 3D graphics in PCs and the First Person Shooter genre.
Book of CP-System covers the history, software and hardware of Capcom's famous arcade machines and their games.
You can download them for free as PDFs or buy them from Amazon, TheBookPatch and PlayStore.
He also accepts donations.
- Get Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D,2nd Edition
- Get Game Engine Black Book: DOOM
- Get The Book of CP-System
If you like these, there's a book that is, in a way, closely related: Michael Abrash' Graphics Programming Black Book — for free at GitHub.
Verbatim from Sanglard's Wolfestein 3D book:
In the early 90s, Michael Abrash’s writings were one of the rare sources of high quality information when it came to computer graphics and assembly programming.
He published two highly regarded books ("Zen of Assembly Language" in 1990 and "Zen of Code Optimization" in 1994) but it is through his column "Ramblings in Realtime" published monthly in Dr. Dobb’s Journal that he achieved notoriety.
In 1997 most of Michael Abrash’s work plus new articles about the Quake engine were compiled into the Graphics Programming Black Book. The title and dimension of this book are an homage to Mr Abrash’s masterpiece.
Many game programmers of that era, including John Carmack, learned a few techniques from Michael Abrash.
Most of these tricks have little to no value in a world of vertex and fragment shaders, but their historical significance cannot be overstated.
-
Fabien Sanglard deserves his own section here. He published 3 amazing, beautiful books: Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D, Game Engine Black Book: DOOM and The Book of CP-System.
I didn't read these books — I devoured them.
The first two cover the history of idSoftware, including some fun facts about John Carmack, John Romero and other members of the company; and then dig deep into the software of Wolfestein 3D and DOOM, the two games that completely revolutionized 3D graphics in PCs and the First Person Shooter genre.
Book of CP-System covers the history, software and hardware of Capcom's famous arcade machines and their games.
You can download them for free as PDFs or buy them from Amazon, TheBookPatch and PlayStore.
He also accepts donations.
- Get Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D,2nd Edition
- Get Game Engine Black Book: DOOM
- Get The Book of CP-System
If you like these, there's a book that is, in a way, closely related: Michael Abrash' Graphics Programming Black Book — for free at GitHub.
Verbatim from Sanglard's Wolfestein 3D book:
In the early 90s, Michael Abrash’s writings were one of the rare sources of high quality information when it came to computer graphics and assembly programming.
He published two highly regarded books ("Zen of Assembly Language" in 1990 and "Zen of Code Optimization" in 1994) but it is through his column "Ramblings in Realtime" published monthly in Dr. Dobb’s Journal that he achieved notoriety.
In 1997 most of Michael Abrash’s work plus new articles about the Quake engine were compiled into the Graphics Programming Black Book. The title and dimension of this book are an homage to Mr Abrash’s masterpiece.
Many game programmers of that era, including John Carmack, learned a few techniques from Michael Abrash.
Most of these tricks have little to no value in a world of vertex and fragment shaders, but their historical significance cannot be overstated.
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The Joy of Cryptography by Mike Rosulek, available for free, Published in 2021.
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This book is widely regarded as one of the best in the Linux ecosystem, and it was recommended, among others, by the famous Lennart Poettering in a FOSDEM interview in 2011, for his then-upcoming talk, systemd, beyond init.
So, get yourself a copy of The Linux Programming Interface, ignore everything it says about POSIX compatibility and hack away your amazing Linux software.
Poettering is the author of Avahi, PulseAudio and systemd.
Although this book is a bit old, having been published in 2010, back when the most recent version of the Linux kernel was 2.6, it still stands relevant.
Because the developers of both the Linux kernel and glibc are committed to maintaining ABI compatibility, virtually all of the details provided in TLPI should remain accurate in the future.
The author maintains a list of changes introduced to the kernel and glibc since the book was published at Linux and glibc API changes.
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The "Mastering" series by Andreas M. Antonopoulos is probably the best resource in this field.
You can get the these for free at GitHub:
Mastering Bitcoin is pretty technical, focusing on low-level aspects. If you'd only read one of these three, go for this one. It's the only one of the three that I have read completely.
Mastering Ethereum focuses more on developing smart contracts and the Solidity programming language rather than the low level details. I think I read about half of this one. It's pretty good, but I found it a bit less entertaining than MB. I'll come back to it, some day.
Mastering Lightning seems to be somewhere in the middle in complexity. I didn't really read this one yet.
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The "Mastering" series by Andreas M. Antonopoulos is probably the best resource in this field.
You can get the these for free at GitHub:
Mastering Bitcoin is pretty technical, focusing on low-level aspects. If you'd only read one of these three, go for this one. It's the only one of the three that I have read completely.
Mastering Ethereum focuses more on developing smart contracts and the Solidity programming language rather than the low level details. I think I read about half of this one. It's pretty good, but I found it a bit less entertaining than MB. I'll come back to it, some day.
Mastering Lightning seems to be somewhere in the middle in complexity. I didn't really read this one yet.
-
The "Mastering" series by Andreas M. Antonopoulos is probably the best resource in this field.
You can get the these for free at GitHub:
Mastering Bitcoin is pretty technical, focusing on low-level aspects. If you'd only read one of these three, go for this one. It's the only one of the three that I have read completely.
Mastering Ethereum focuses more on developing smart contracts and the Solidity programming language rather than the low level details. I think I read about half of this one. It's pretty good, but I found it a bit less entertaining than MB. I'll come back to it, some day.
Mastering Lightning seems to be somewhere in the middle in complexity. I didn't really read this one yet.
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Another history book, this time focused on Unix exclusively. 100% recommend it.
It's available for free on Unix Heritage Wiki.
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David Wong's Real-World Cryptography is a modern and friendly book. Published in 2021.
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This book is amazing. It's purely prose. Nothing technical here. No code. Just history.
It goes over the entire history of Linux, Free Software, Open Source, from nothing to being the most used OS, running on almost every device on earth, and exploding into a billion-dollar industry.
It's available at Amazon.
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Mara Bos's Rust Atomics and Locks is amazing, and it's free.
In reality, it's an excellent read about multithreading programming in general (see JavaScript's Atomics, for example), regardless of the language of choice.