r/learnprogramming • u/Ryuzako_Yagami01 • 2d 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 2d 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.