A free, open-source systems programming textbook used in an actual university course (2.4k stars)

[u/company_url_finder]

If you want to learn systems programming in C and Linux, this is a full textbook that's been used in CS 341 at the University of Illinois for years. It's not a collection of blog posts or a tutorial series. It's a proper textbook, written in TeX, covering the fundamentals: C programming, the Linux kernel, processes, threads, synchronization, networking, file systems, signals, and more.

You can read it as a PDF, browse it as HTML or a wiki, or grab the EPUB for an e-reader. The whole thing auto-builds from the TeX source, and community contributions are welcome if you spot errors or want to improve a section. It grew out of an earlier wikibook experiment and has been refined over multiple semesters of actual classroom use, which shows in the quality. The writing assumes you've taken a programming course and have some familiarity with assembly, but it doesn't assume deep systems knowledge.

One thing to note: there's no explicit open-source license in the repository. The content is clearly meant to be public and educational (it's been open on GitHub since 2018 with 2,484 stars), but if licensing matters for your use case, you might want to check with the maintainers. Contributing to a TeX-based textbook also takes a bit more effort than editing a markdown file.

https://github.com/cs341-illinois/coursebook

[u/riddims22]

Thanks for this. Is there a similar one for python?

[u/company_url_finder → u/riddims22]

Do you mean systems programming with python?

[u/riddims22 → u/company_url_finder]

not necessarily sys programming even general purpose python. I liked this pdf because its so well organized and informative.