I'm interested in learning more about the PC from a lower (machine) level. I graduated from a school which taught us concepts using the Java language which abstracted out that level almost completely. As a result I only learned a bit from the one required assembly language course. In order to cram in ASM and quite a few details about architecture, it was hard to get a very deep picture of what is going on there. At work I focus on unix socket programming in C, so i'm much closer to the hardware now, but I feel I should learn a bit more about what streams really are, how memory management and paging works, what goes on when you call "paint()" on a graphics buffer, etc. I missed out on a lot of this and i'm looking for a good resource to get me started. I've heard a lot about the "Pink Book" by Peter Norton (Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC, Programmer's Guide to inside the PC, etc). It seems like this is on the right track, however the original is quite out dated and the newer ones have had conflicting reviews, with many people saying to stay away from it. I'm not sure what the SO crowd thinks about this book or if they have some suggestions for similar books, online resources, etc that may be good primers for this sort of thing. Any suggestions would be appreciated.