What this book covers

Overview of Systems Programming sets the stage and explains what systems programming is all about.

Chapter 1, The One with the Low-Level Secrets, dives into the low-level APIs, the BCL and CLR, and how to use Win32 APIs.

Chapter 2, The One Where Speed Matters, examines how to make your software perform as fast as possible.

Chapter 3, The One with the Memory Games, talks about memory handling, the garbage collector, and how to be as memory efficient as possible.

Chapter 4, The One with the Thread Tangles, looks at threads and asynchronous programming.

Chapter 5, The One with the Filesystem Chronicles , teaches input/output, file handling, encryption, and compression of files.

Chapter 6, The One Where Processes Whisper, talks about how to make programs communicate on one machine or over a network.

Chapter 7, The One with the Operating System Tango, dives into the operating system’s services and how to use them.

Chapter 8, The One with the Network Navigation, discusses everything we need to know about networking in your application, both as a server and a client.

Chapter 9, The One with the Hardware Handshakes, deals with connecting to outside hardware and communicating with other devices.

Chapter 10, The One with the Systems Check-Ups, talks about logging and monitoring your software.

Chapter 11, The One with the Debugging Dances, is all about debugging your software.

Chapter 12, The One with the Security Safeguards, talks about the security of your software.

Chapter 13, The One with the Deployment Dramas, teaches you how to deploy your software to the production machines.

Chapter 14, The One with the Linux Leaps, discusses the operating system that most of our software will run on: Linux.