Month 1 Reading

Free and high-signal. Read the primary sources before the videos. Reading documentation, rather than watching someone narrate it, is itself part of this month’s curriculum. Avoid YouTube rabbit holes.

Core

• article What is computer hardware? (IBM) - a clean overview of the parts you inventoried in Lab 1.1.
• article UEFI homepage and overview (Intel) - background for Lab 1.2’s firmware layer.
• article The Linux Boot Process Explained - maps directly onto the boot chain you trace in Lab 1.2.
• book chapter Tanenbaum, Modern Operating Systems, Chapter 1, sections 1.1 through 1.4. Use a library copy; do not pirate. This is the best grounding for the kernel-versus-user-space split.

Reference (consult as needed)

• The UEFI Forum specification overview, for the boot-manager and Secure Boot concepts (primary source for Lab 1.2 Task 4).
• Ubuntu’s official documentation on UEFI and Secure Boot.
• man pages on your own machine for every command you run: system_profiler, sysctl, efibootmgr, base64, xxd.

Optional

• video Computer Hardware Components overview - overview only. Do not rely on it in place of the reading above.

A note on sources

When a lab asks you to cite a source, cite from “Core” or “Reference.” Do not cite from “Optional,” and do not cite a blog. Building the habit of reaching for primary sources now is what makes you able to evaluate AI output later, when AI will confidently cite things that do not exist.