Can you recommend any good book about low level programming?

Question

Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer, and I'm really acting as a proxy to ask this question here :)

In old days, there was Peter Norton's Programmer's Guide to IBM PC. This book served as invaluable source of information for every person that wanted to write all things low-level. What book nowadays can be recommended as source of knowledge about low-level programming and general PC architecture knowledge? How CPU is built, how it is being used by operating system. Ideally it should be OS-agnostic, without dragging user into arcana of win32 or linux kernel specific.

Answer 1

See an earlier question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/558703/readings-tools-and-libraries-for-low-level-network-related-softwares-in-c

Answer 2

Professional Assembly Language Programmer (for me is the best book about assembly)

The Art of Assembly Language

Answer 3

What about Structured Computer Organization written by Andrew Tanenbaum? It's more about computer architecture rather than programming languages.

Answer 4

as for general architecture, some de-facto standards include:

Hennessy & Patterson - Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach

Tanenbaum - Structured Computer Organization

My assembly class used Mazidi & Mazidi - 80X86 IBM PC and Compatible Computers: Assembly Language, Design, and Interfacing Volumes I & II, it was decent if a little rough around the edges.

Also seconding the Art of Assembly, linked by pho3nix.

Answer 5

The IA-32 manuals is an invaluable source for implementing low level stuff (Like an OS) on x86 processors. http://www.intel.com/products/processor/manuals/