Linkers and Loaders

It's rare to find a book on such an obscure subject, much less such a well-written inclusive one. It is succinct, so don't feel daunted that you'll have to wade through hundreds upon hundreds of pages of dense technical material. This book can't come more highly recommended.

As far as I'm aware, this is the only book on the market that covers this subject. Clearly this book will be of use to someone that is starting on writing a link editor (or any other tool that manipulates object files). Even for developers that aren't in that category (myself included), then there were interesting things to be learnt. For instance, prior to reading this book, I was unaware of the exact consequences of compiling PIC code for shared libraries. Now that I understand this better, I'll know the impact on performance of code that is destined for chared libraries.

This particular book had all the information I needed to know to make a COFF standard linker.

This is one of the excellent book, that gives enormous information to know how object files are created and how linker in various OS works.

I picked up this book to delve into interesting problems with a loader that I work with and was amazed at the great story told of what happens to your code after it goes through that compiler and becomes an object. It's not done yet, folks.This book covers a broad range of topics, after first explaining the basics and architecture gotchas, to all the phases from the back end of the compiler to a program running in memory. Three example platforms are used to illustrate this journey: Intel x86 and 32-bit Windows, UltraSPARC and Solaris, and the IBM 360/370. However, it touches upon a great deal other challenges and formats.Some might consider the symbolic journey from source code to running program to be equivalent to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" but Levine's book makes it more like a guided tour at a Disney Theme park. There are wonderful examples and code snippets. Clear diagrams and excellent writing.My only complaint about this book is that the back cover makes a lot of noise about Java, but the material inside is pretty paltry alongside the more developed material on C, FORTRAN, and C++ issues. Java is really not that complicated or important to Linkers and Loaders.