This book was absolutely amazing! It is astonishingly well-written, almost actually exciting to read at times, and chock full of fascinating insights and anecdotes. Oh, and its main text was really useful as well, uncovering so many programming language behaviors I had seen many times before, but never figured out why things were as they are.<p>Truly, I can't recommend this book enough, if the topic is at all interesting to you!<p>(And follow it up with Code, by Charles Petzold, to see how a processor works, and Operating Systems, Three Easy Pieces by Arpaci-Dusseau for how OSs work)