Just now I have encountered the wonders of stack traces and other such crazy degugging things involving big collections of numbers that somehow mean something. I read a quick tutorial on debugging, only to have more questions! (It did help, but I need to know why).
I know some basic terminology like what the call stack is, what the instruction pointer is... What I don't know is how and why it all ties together and how all this connects to the big jumbles of numbers that we create.
I realize that this stuff changes between processors and operating systems, but it seems the core concepts stay rather similar. Where should I look if I want to find out how this stuff works? How does a computer program get from a file full of crazy numbers to a usable interface that actually does something?
I know some basic terminology like what the call stack is, what the instruction pointer is... What I don't know is how and why it all ties together and how all this connects to the big jumbles of numbers that we create.
I realize that this stuff changes between processors and operating systems, but it seems the core concepts stay rather similar. Where should I look if I want to find out how this stuff works? How does a computer program get from a file full of crazy numbers to a usable interface that actually does something?