Ask HN: The book that did it for you in math and/or CS?
Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces<p><a href="https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/" rel="nofollow">https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/</a><p>I failed the interview for an internship I really wanted in my 2nd year of engineering; I did get a shit internship that summer, but being really shaken at my incompetence, I took up this book, and quite honestly, it changed everything!<p>It truly sparked an interest in systems for me. The book helped me build a strong foundation in systems; Processes, memory, filesystems, networks, concurrency, synchronization and more. After reading OSTEP, it felt like an epiphany, and I charted a path for the rest of 2 years of college around distributed systems, systems research, and virtualization.<p>And the best part is that all this knowledge is free! Kudos to Professor Remzi and his work!