Not only that, but most of the books he recommends are simply too narrowly focused to be useful to software engineers in general. It's useful to understand most

Not only that, but most of the books he recommends are simply too narrowly focused to be useful to software engineers in general. It's useful to understand most of these things at a conceptual level, but you don't need a book to do that - Wikipedia and some thinking will suffice. I can't imagine, for example, why every developer needs to understand linking and loading at the binary level. In a modern language, those problems are solved for you, to the point that I'd consider switching platforms if they weren't. I used the computer systems book when I took a computer architecture course in college, and although it did provide some interesting thought exercises, I can't say it's had any effect on my professional career. I certainly wouldn't recommend reading it on your own unless you're planning on working at a level below the OS (and if you are, you probably already know about this book).