Programming From The Ground Up

A modernized, multi-architecture edition of Jonathan Bartlett's Programming from the Ground Up — the classic introduction to how computers work, via x86 assembly. This edition ships the book as a Sphinx site (HTML/PDF/EPUB), keeps the original hand-written x86-32 examples, and adds C translations that compile to readable assembly on five Linux architectures (i386, x86-64, ARM, AArch64, MIPS) so you can see the same program across instruction sets.

Build the book

Requires podman and make.

make BUILD_DOCS=1 USE_GRAPHICS=0 docs

HTML, PDF, and EPUB land under ./output/pgu/.

Development environment

make BUILD_DOCS=0 USE_GRAPHICS=1 shell

Drops you into a Fedora container in /pgu/src with a 32-bit + 64-bit toolchain (clang/gcc, gdb/lldb). The assembly examples are in src/*.s; the C ports and their build are in src/c/ (make, make check, and cross-compile via EXTRA_CFLAGS — see src/c/README.md).

Layout

Path	What
docs/	The Sphinx book (25 chapters/appendices)
src/	Hand-written x86-32 assembly examples
src/c/	C ports + a 5-arch syscall layer (os.h)
upstreamSource/	Original DocBook XML (porting reference)

License

The book is a port of Jonathan Bartlett's original work, under the GNU Free Documentation License (see docs/source/fdlap.rst).