I was thinking somewhere on the similar lines when deciding how to approach this. I split the process into 3 initial steps as well. 1. Learn the C language. Re

I was thinking somewhere on the similar lines when deciding how to approach this. I split the process into 3 initial steps as well. 1. Learn the C language. Read K&R book, then get my hands dirty with some relatively simple problems. Here I'm actually deciding between practicing with algorithmic problems and doing a simple project or I can probably do both. Anyway I'm leaning towards algorithms because they normally are short enough to be possible to work on with the minimal amount of knowledge on the standard library and are complicated enough to be a good practice, particularly when it comes to performance and memory usage. This approach would also make me learn how different data structures are handled in C and how to deal with memory management. 2. Learn systems programming. At this step after some initial reading I would like to join a relatively small open source project and try to fix some bugs or contribute some small changes to it. I didn't decide yet what particular project it could be so any suggestions are welcome :) At this step I should become comfortable with writing C and gain some basic knowledge on systems programming. 3. Get deeper into systems programming. This is were I'm deciding between taking on Linux/BSD or MINIX. I suppose MINIX should work very well as a learning tool for OS design and implementation. So it could make transition to Linux/BSD easier. At this stage I could probably join some open source OS project. What comes after that I'm not quite sure. There may be more steps involved or I may be ready to look for a job at this point. I may also need to decide what exactly I want to work on which leads me to the difficult question I raised to myself when thinking about this. Should I specialize from the very beginning or can I be a generalist with a strong general systems programming knowledge and then get to the details when the need arises based on particular job?