What would you say is the best book to buy to understand exactly how programming works under the hood in order to increase performance? I've coded in assembly at university, I studied computer architecture and I obviously did high level programming, but what I really dont understand is things like:

-what is happening when I perform a cast -whats the difference in performance if I declare something global as opposed to local? -How does the memory layout for an ArrayList compare with a Vector or LinkedList? -Whats the overhead with pointers? -Are locks more efficient than using synchronized? -Would creating my own array using int[] be faster than using ArrayList -Advantages/disadvantages of declaring a variable volatile

I have got a copy of Java Performance Tuning but it doesnt go down very low and it contains rather obvious things like suggesting a hashmap instead of using an ArrayList as you can map the keys to memory addresses etc. I want something a bit more Computer Sciencey, linking the programming language to what happens with the assembler/hardware.

The reason im asking is that I have an interview coming up for a job in High Frequency Trading and everything has to be as efficient as possible, yet I cant remember every single possible efficiency saving so i'd just like to learn the fundamentals.

Thanks in advance