The only way to learn this is to study complete systems done by others (books, existing systems that you are working on etc.) As Bismarck said; “Only a fool le

The only way to learn this is to study complete systems done by others (books, existing systems that you are working on etc.) As Bismarck said; “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” The same is applicable on the positive side too. So read/study as much as you can and memorize/learn key design techniques. C/C++ is particularly rich in this regard since there is so much (of varying degrees of complexity) out there in these languages. Two concrete examples; 1) When i started out with Computers in early 1990's, i read Al Williams' Turbo C.: Memory Resident Utilities, Screen Input/Output and Programming Techniques This book taught me how to layer abstractions and build systems one layer at a time. For example, the book defines a layer over the BIOS api, layer on top of that to design a windowing system, layer on top of that to design a window manager and use that to write a memory-resident text editor. Lots of different things coming together harmoniously to build a complete system. 2) A few years ago when i started to study Embedded Systems, as a Software Guy (no Electronics knowledge) i was at a loss to understand HW gobbledygook until i came across Michael Pont's Patterns for Time-Triggered Embedded Systems (large book freely available at https://www.safetty.net/publications/pttes https://www.safetty.net/publications/pttes) It is full of C code showing exactly how to interface with various HW in an Embedded System. That gave me everything i needed to understand how to implement a bare-metal Embedded System and eventually understand the HW (from other books).