Trivia : An example of speed improvement due to good hardware knowledge: Doom stored textures horizontally in RAM to take full advantage of the cacheline.

Trivia : An other example of speed improvement due to good hardware knowledge: OpenGL Interleaved arrays are faster than separate arrays (thanks to cacheline again).

Operating Systems

Whether it is to perform I/O, display something on the screen or communicate on the network you program will have to leave user-space at some point. What happens in kernel-space is explained here.

Modern Operating Systems
Virtual Time, Virtual Memory, Virtual Filesystem, System calls, Sleep/Busy Locks and Process scheduler (to name only a few key concepts) are clearly explained in this great book by Tanenbaum.

The Linux Programming Interface
Have you ever wondered how malloc is implemented by the C Library ? This book offers a top-down approach to understand what the Operating System can do for your application/library. A departure from the bottom-up description of "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation" that may be easier for some readers. A must have regardless.

Trivia : An example of speed improvement due to good knowledge of page-fault: Firefox boots two seconds faster thanks to DLL preloading.

Programming Language

Most of my code is C and I discussed the best books for the C programming Language in a previous article. I hope to be able to recommend the two best C++ books soon.

Inspiration

Three components lead to success:

• Passion.
• Skills
• Luck.

Most of us have Passion and Skills. It is very inspiring to see what happen when Luck is also part of the equation:

The Pixar Touch:
They should have gone broke and failed several times...but instead flew to Infinity and Beyond ! Many delicious technical trivias (early days of Framebuffers, texture mapping) and great anecdotes about human rivalties/survival: Passion, Skills and a LOT of Luck. Also: Crazy schedules.

Masters of Doom:
Passion, Binary Space Partition and a little bit of Luck ! Also: Crazy schedules.

Adapting the stack

The books mentioned should satisfy most stacks but it is paramount to adapt it to your specific needs. Since I do a fair amount of network programming those times, I would certainly include the masterpiece: "The TCP/IP Guide".

My past career as a 3D-engine developer involved a lot of Computer Graphics, I would have mentioned the following:

Real-Time Rendering
An extensive reference that describes the recent realtime rendering techniques. An essential map that will help you to know where you want to dig deeper. A CG Classic.

Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
A very old book that still contains very good lessons (especially planes mathematics) but really an inspiring celebration of Michael Abrash's motto: "Do what you Love, work with humility and Good Things will come eventually".

All together

Since I receive email asking what books to start with all the time, here is A beginner's stack.

I was tempted to add " The TCP/IP Guide" and "Hacking : The Art of Exploitation".

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Comments (14)

#1 - Norman - 01/17/2013 - 11:27

In addition for C :

1. Zed Shaw´s "Learn C the Hard Way" ( http://c.learncodethehardway.org/book/ )
2. 21st Century C ( http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920025108.do )

#2 - Edouard - 01/17/2013 - 11:49

Dude, you read in my mind.
Yesterday I was thinking :
"I would be very interested to know which books Fabien owns and what are his best readings !"
Thank you !

#3 - Ben Malavisuriya - 01/17/2013 - 12:59

thank you very much for these recommendations, time to get started.

#4 - Michael - 01/17/2013 - 16:09

I've been working C since I read your "http://fabiensanglard.net/c/index.php" article. I've been quite interested in Quake. I cannot seem to find a good reference for OpenGL in C. Can you suggest an OpenGL book that I can hook into with C? Amazon seems to list too many for me understand what I should be looking for.

#5 - fabien sanglard - 01/17/2013 - 16:34

@ Michael:

The OpenGL SuperBible was good back in the OpenGL 2.0 days. I have heard the latest edition is pretty good too.

#6 - Sergey - 01/18/2013 - 01:06

Really great stack for programmer. Petzold and Tanenbaum have written great books.

#7 - Toni - 01/25/2013 - 10:15

On your Twitter, you posted a picture with two books from Tanenbaum. What did you think of the 'Design and implementation' book? Worth the money?

Thanks for a great blog!

#8 - fabien sanglard - 01/25/2013 - 14:15

@Toni

"Operating Systems: Design and implementation" is all about Mimix architecture. It is very good if you want to learn about the internals of a MicroKernels with Client/Server design.

#9 - Riko - 01/28/2013 - 07:33

Can you add books about algorithm design and problem solving? I'm curious as to what books you'd suggest in that regard.

#10 - fabien sanglard - 01/29/2013 - 22:10

@Riko

In terms of algorithm I would recommend the books by Robert Sedgewick ("Algorithms" is a reference book), Abrash provides a pretty cool explanation of Boyer-Moore in his "Black Book" and of course there is the classic "The Art of Computer Programming" by Donald Knuth.

#11 - Dominik - 02/04/2013 - 16:45

Thanks Fabien for this great list.
I think its a good help for my Bachlor Thesis. I might also add "Computer Grafics - Principles and Practice".
Thanks again.

#12 - Christophe - 02/06/2013 - 05:33

Thanks alot for the recommendations!
I'm also looking for a beginner's book on Direct3D programming; any thoughts?

#13 - Matthew Stenquist - 02/15/2013 - 05:11

C O D E by Charles Peltzoid is one of my favorite books. The first few chapters of Morse code, and Braille really make C O D E wonderful to read!

#14 - exim - 02/15/2013 - 15:20

In case if your interest is not limited to only browsing someone else's [brilliant] game sources from 80s or early 90s ;) :

Bjarne Stroustrup - The C++ Programming Language

 

@2013