Tough question. I'm not aware of any books that are substitutes for reading and writing large projects, some books I've found useful: TCP/IP Illustrated: The I

Tough question. I'm not aware of any books that are substitutes for reading and writing large projects, some books I've found useful: TCP/IP Illustrated: The Implementation (goes through the implementation of the 4.4BSD-Lite network stack), Lion's Commentary on UNIX (or xv6 book), Network Algorithmics (amazing book), Linux Kernel Development by Love, Large Scale C++ Software Design, Design Patterns. A lot of people like the Architecture of Open Source Applications books. I also think learning more computer architecture as the beginning of computer systems engineering is good for everyone, but that's just me. Lampson's classic on hints for computer system design: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/acrobat-17.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/... Here is a previous HN post on the subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8000811 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8000811 The Clean Code author has a Clean Architecture book but I don't think it is out yet.