Binil and I have decided to study Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective together. We are going to use the first edition because we both already own that and the 2nd edition is damn costly. Binil is in California and I am in Washington, so it is going to be a long distance combined study. We imagine this would take up the rest of this year, and even then it will be a challenging task (because we intend to do the exercises as well).

One of the challenge would be to maintain the interest in the project. I usually lose interest in any book after reading about 100 pages or so and this book is a little over 900 pages. We have decided that one should help the other maintain the momentum, motivation and interest. Another challenge is that (as I mentioned earlier) we are not in the same location. We decided we would communicate through email during the weekdays and have a telecon on the weekends. We should be able to fine tune the process as we go along. We also expect other challenges to show up as we go along but failing halfway would be better than not doing it at all (this pearl of wisdom may not apply to everything, so reader discretion advised).

For the first week, starting today, we will attempt to read the first chapter (there are no exercises in the first chapter).

P.S. One of the reasons for making this blog post is that making our commitments public will give us more motivation and inspiration to complete it or at least stick with it for a longer period than otherwise.