Holy crap I have that book. Can you elaborate more? I’m learning C right now for a variety of reasons but I didn’t think learning posix c would bump my value as a web dev.

One example was being able to write native gems so that I integrate ruby directly with other C based services. Writing ruby code that directly interacts with mail servers, databases in a thread safe manor was quite useful.

Like learning assembly, sometimes it’s not directly useful, but it does make you write better code; since you understand more of what’s under the hood.

In which chapter was this again? And which edition?

Is that $20k or 20x? Could legitimately see either.

Lol. 20k.

I was a competent programmer and a Linux user, but system stuff always seemed like black magic.

With this book I was able to tackle much harder problems

I'd be interested in the details of how reading a book and doing examples impacted your salary.