Learning systems programming

The only way you can learn systems programming is by developing your own utilities using this book as a reference and a tutorial. At first, you will make a large amount of ridiculous mistakes, but as you get better, you will make a smaller amount of much more clever and hard to debug mistakes! However, it is fine to try new things when learning. In fact, it is necessary to try new things and fail because this means that you are really learning something new. Just make sure that you do not use a production web server for learning systems programming.

If you have difficulties finding out what to develop, you can start by creating your own versions of some of the existing Unix command line utilities such as ls(1), mkdir(1), ln(1), wc(1), and which(1). You do not have to create a fully featured version of each one of them with support for all command-line options; what is important is to develop a stable and secure version that implements the main functionality and works without problems.