Very nice especially the pedagogy. A little bit of code (in a top-down manner) together with the corresponding explanation for a complete app is how things used

Very nice especially the pedagogy. A little bit of code (in a top-down manner) together with the corresponding explanation for a complete app is how things used to be explained in the old days. I still remember studying Al Stevens' book Turbo C: Memory Resident Utilities, Screen I-O and Programming Techniques (for DOS) and learning how to layer software viz. 1) a layer over BIOS, 2) a layer to draw windows using (1) 3) a desktop manager using (2) 4) a text editor 5) making the editor memory-resident. Reading that book really taught me how to use C to build a non-trivial app. A very good Unix book with lots of projects like shell, token ring etc. is Practical UNIX Programming: A Guide to Concurrency, Communication, and Multithreading by Kay Robbins and Steven Robbins. It's 2nd edition is named UNIX Systems Programming: Communication, Concurrency and Threads. The code given in the book is really illuminating.