You'll learn a lot of this via debugging or reverse engineering. Do you REALLY know how your compiler, linker, and loader work? If you do, you'll understand e

You'll learn a lot of this via debugging or reverse engineering. Do you REALLY know how your compiler, linker, and loader work? If you do, you'll understand everything they wrote about static variables, stack frames, etc. The best exercise to start with is this one on creating the smallest ELF executable possible: http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.html http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/teensy.htm... And after that I'd do the same thing on Windows with a PE file. Then try to break things. Try to write a C program that has a buffer overflow bug in it and exploit that to change the flow of program execution. Then exploit the same bug to open an xterm or calc.exe. Getting really familiar with a good debugger will help you a lot with these things. After you have a decent understanding of program loading and execution, you can dive into the more language lawyery things they're talking about so you can answer the questions about the nineteen different meanings of "static" like the hacker girl. With C, that's a worthwhile goal. With C++, good fucking luck.