What books should I get.

[jxu]

You're welcome. The book also has information on multicore systems, pipelining, cache, I/O, GPUs, and much more than I will ever be able to read. I also have a collection of many PDFs on math and computer design topics that would be useful if I ever take up an interest in low level computing again, which seems more and more unlikely. I haven't even gotten around to skimming the massive amounts of information in some of these manuals (http://www.agner.org/optimize/microarchitecture.pdf).