Download the eBook ($12) For software developers, the world of hardware and firmware can be an exciting change. Firmware catapults your logic into the physical world. Rather than moving text between forms and a database, you can move motors. Rather than listening for an API call, you can listen for ...

GDB is an old and ubiquitous debugger for Linux and BSD systems that has extensive language, processor, and binary format support. Its interface is a little cryptic, but learning GDB pays off. This article is a set of miscellaneous configuration and scripting tricks that illustrate reusable principl...

Although parsing is often described from the perspective of writing a compiler, there are many common smaller tasks where it’s useful. Reading file formats, talking over the network, creating shells, and analyzing source code are all easier using a robust parser. By taking time to learn general-purp...

In this article we’ll learn how to build shared libraries and install them properly on several platforms. For guidance, we’ll examine the goals and history of dynamic linking on UNIX-based operating systems. Content for the article comes from researching how to create a shared library, wading throug...

After several years’ involvement with quickly evolving programming languages, I’ve come to appreciate stability. I’d like to make my programs easy to build on a wide variety of systems with minimal adjustment. I’d like them to keep working long into the future as environments change. To think about ...

The goal I want to create emails that look their best in all mail clients, whether graphical or text based. Ideally I’d write a message in a simple format like Markdown, and generate the final email from the input file. Additionally, I’d like to be able to include fenced code snippets in the message...

LibreSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that improves code quality and security. It was originally developed for OpenBSD, but has since been ported to several platforms (Linux, *BSD, HP-UX, Solaris, macOS, AIX, Windows) and is now the default TLS provider for some of them. When debugging a program that uses L...

Mention concurrency and you’re bound to get two kinds of unsolicited advice: first that it’s a nightmarish problem which will melt your brain, and second that there’s a magical programming language or niche paradigm which will make all your problems disappear. We won’t run to either extreme here. In...

This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more thoughtfully. physical books To go beyond the to...

Most programming languages evolved awkwardly during the transition from ASCII to 16-bit UCS-2 to full Unicode. They contain internationalization features that often aren’t portable or don’t suffice. Unicode is more than a numbering scheme for the characters of every language – although that in itsel...