This page contains additional resources for students using the CS:APP text.

Textbook

• Original Powerpoint line drawings
• Code examples

C/Unix

• CS:APP Unix FAQ
• Prof. Norm Matloff's Unix/C Tutorial Center

GNU/Unix Tools

• The GNU project provides online manuals for all of the GNU tools, including:
  • Emacs (text editor)
  • GCC (compiler driver)
  • GDB (debugger)
  • Make (program building utility)
• Prof. Norm Matloff's GDB tutorial
• Quick GDB reference ( pdf, ps, txt )
• Quick GDB x86-64 reference ( txt )

Pentium Documentation

• Intel Architecture Software Developer's Manual:
  • Volume 1: Basic Architecture (pdf, ps2up.gz).
    Chapters 3--6 contain useful information. Note that much of this documention is irrelevant---we are only running in ``flat'' addressing mode, and GAS does not support conditional moves, MMX, or SSE instructions. The overall document is 369 pages long. You probably don't want to print it out.

  • Volume 2: Instruction Set Reference (pdf, ps2up.gz).
    Chapter 3 contains a detailed description of every instruction. Note that they list the operands in the reverse order from their ordering in GAS. This manual is 854 pages long. You definitely don't want to print it out.

  • Volume 3: System Programming (pdf, ps2up.gz).
    Contains lots of useful information on the interface between the hardware and the operating system, including cache and TLB specs, virtual memory, exceptions and interrupt handling, and processes.

Chapter 2: Representing and Manipulating Information

• Practice Problem 2.9: This problem uses the RGB color system as an illustration of a Boolean algebra. Here's a full color depiction of this color system.
• Writing TMin as an integer constant in C (as is done in Figure 2.13 and Practice Problem 2.20) is a bit tricky. See the Note on writing TMin in C for a more detailed explanation.
• A note on comparing floating point numbers

Chapter 3: Machine-Level Representation of Programs

• Description of AOL's buffer overflow exploit on their own AIM clients.
• Description of the 1988 Internet Worm (pdf).
• Specifying byte operands for inline assembly with GCC. See Note on byte operands with inline assembly.

Chapter 4: Processor Architecture

• Y86 tools and documentation
  • Source distribution (README)
  • Linux/Pentium binary distribution (README)
  • SunOS/Sparc binary distribution (README)
  • Simulator guide (pdf)
  • Technical report describing a successful effort at formally verifying the pipelined Y86 implementations. (pdf)

Chapter 5: Optimizing Program Performance

• Text files to benchmark word frequency analysis program
  • Full text of the collected works of Shakespeare.
  • Full text of Moby Dick.

Chapter 6: The Memory Hierarchy

• Generate your own memory using the ECT memperf tool developed by Tom Stricker (the inventor of the memory mountain) and Christian Kurmann at ETH.
• A less sophisticated program from the CS:APP book for generating the memory mountain (tar)

Chapter 10: Virtual Memory

• P. Wilson, M. Johnstone, M. Neely, and D. Boles, Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review, International Workshop on Memory Management, Kinross, Scotland, Sept, 1995. (ps).
  Comprehensive reference on storage allocators.

Chapter 12: Network Programming

• The Tiny Web server (tiny.tar).
  Expands with tar xvf tiny.tar into a directory called ./tiny that contains everything you need to test the Tiny web server, including sample HTML files, GIFS, CGI scripts, and the csapp.c and csapp.h files from Appendix B of the text. Compiled and tested on Linux boxes.
• The authoritative list of MIME types.