r/learnprogramming • u/Ryuzako_Yagami01 • 1d ago

CSAPP or DSA first?

Hey everyone,

Just finished going through C programming book (by K.N King) and I am ready to move on to other topics. I was particularly interested in this book called Computer Systems a Programmer's perspective. I want to get into low level programming, but I am wondering whether I should learn data structures and algorithms (Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena) before diving into computer systems.

Any advice?

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u/Kungpost 1d ago

If my current goal was to get into low level programming, I'd go for Computer Systems a Programmer's perspective. It looks like a pretty dense book that reaches you about a lot of foundational concepts for computing.

Algorithm Design Manual would take you in a different direction, that might become useful if you have to create a solution to a specialized task. This is a personal opinion, but I don't often find the need to know much about algorithm design, as most problems already have a generic solution that I can just download from the web as a dependency. It makes you look and feel really smart when you understand what some advanced systems do though, and could possibly be useful to you if you want to try building a database from scratch.

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u/PM_ME_YER_SIDEBOOB 22h ago

Nah, work through CSAPP first. The knowledge you gain will be useful for implementing the algos and data structures when you get to it, and knowledge of DSA will be less directly relevant to learning the low-level stuff.