I started out with machine code and assembly language.

The human species is often amazingly inventive and industrious but at the same time profoundly lazy. It's very clear that we humans don't like to work. This aversion to work is so extreme - and our ingenuity so acute - that we're eager to devote countless hours designing and building devices that might shave a few minutes off our workday

Code is not like other how-computers-work books. It doesn't have big color illustrations of disk drives with arrows showing how the data sweeps into the computer. Code has no drawings of trains carrying a cargo of zeros and ones. Metaphors and similes are wonderful literary devices but they do nothing but obscure the beauty of technology.

Computer monitors can operate in many different video modes. In most cases, the decision about how many pixels and colors to display is yours - but not always.

You probably don't have much of a choice.

To a programmer, an operating system is defined by its API.

Programming in machine code is like eating with a toothpick