When I was a junior at Duke, we had to make some changes to the Linux kernel for my OS class. Unfortunately, I was the only one who’d had much experience in Linux before, and our professor seemed to think that providing any instruction about how Linux’ kernel worked—or even how Unix programs in general worked—would be overkill. Even great coders will fail if not provided any guidance how to solve a problem.

At the time, our options were to spend serious cash on books, or to struggle along through mailing lists until we can find the answers we needed. We went with the second option, but if you find yourself in a similar boat, there are now decent low-level books on Linux programming available online for free. I only had a chance to look at the chapter on interprocess communication, but assuming the rest of the book’s at the same quality, it should be a solid reference for someone starting Linux programming for the first time.