Printable Reading Log: Fill & Download for Free

I don’t think there is an age limit to learn anything!I am 28 years old and started reading more books two years ago. Before that I used to read two or three books per Year!!Developing any habit is difficult at first. Reading books or speaking a new language is no where different. In my opinion the first step you should take is to understand why you want to read books or speak in English. You should have strong reason to do that. In my case I had two reasons! First I was living in a new country and I felt lonely at times second I wanted to enrich my vocabulary and writing. So find out yours!Once you identify the reasons search for the things that work for you. In case of reading, ask yourself what kind of books you like. There are so many genres of books; romance or thriller or children’s books. For me it was children’s books. In my opinion reading short and simple books are easier rather than long classic books.Next, to improve your speaking, practise speaking with your friends. But I know 99% of the time it doesn’t happen because people will be shy to speak with friends in a language or you think your friends will tease you! If that’s the case get a speaking partner through facebook groups. Or you can practise speaking at your own by recording your speech in a voice recorder. This way you will be able to listen to your own voice!There are lots of youtube videos or podcasts available to practise English. This is a great way to learn things like pronunciation or intonation !If you would like more tips on this I have written a blog post on this. Let me know if you find anything useful!5 tips to read WAY more books every day in 2019! | yourbosomfriend.Also consider having a reading Log just like I love this Illustrated Book Printables And Planners For Booklovers by TheCreativeMuggle

Terminals are devices that provide enhanced input/output capabilities beyond what could be achieved with only regular files, pipes, and sockets. These features are designed to make it easier for humans to interact with computers, and are useless for programs trying to talk to each other.When you run a program in a terminal, you can send it an interrupt signal (SIGINT) by pressing Ctrl-C. On the other hand, when a program is not being controlled by any terminal, and is taking its input from a file, it will not receive a SIGINT whenever it reads a ^C character (\x03).When you run a program in a terminal and it produces a BEL character (\x07), a beep will be produced. If the program is writing to a file, on the other hand, a beep is not produced every time this character is written.When you run ls --color=yes (in GNU at least) in a terminal, you will get a colour-coded directory listing. But if the directory listing is being written to a file, well, you can't colour-code the letters in a text file, can you now?Okay, so how does this work? Well, whenever a process interacts with a file, it goes through a kernel driver. If you open (, read, write, etc.) a regular file on an ext2 partition, the driver involved is the ext2 driver. If you open a named pipe, it goes through the pipe driver (in Linux, this is implemented in fs/pipe.c). And if you open a terminal device node, the terminal device driver handles the request.The terminal driver gets around a bit more than the other kinds of drivers. Whereas the ext2 driver only needs to communicate with the disk, and the pipe driver doesn't need to touch any hardware at all, the terminal driver must listen on the keyboard, draw characters on the screen, and send beeps to the speaker when applicable. I believe the Linux terminals also have mouse support. In this sense, the terminal is an abstraction that represents the entirety of common human-computer interaction. And yes, the X windowing system also runs in a terminal, usually /dev/tty7 on Linux.On a typical PC, at any given time, one of the terminals is in the foreground, and the rest are in the background. The foreground terminal receives all keystrokes and mouse input, and also has exclusive access to what is shown on the monitor. Normally, when you press an ordinary key such as "k", the terminal driver echos the character to the screen and adds it to the buffer, so that whatever process next reads from the terminal device will receive that character. The terminal also responds to arcs like Ctrl-A; it echos this as "^A", but translates it to \x01 before processes can read it. When a process writes characters to the terminal, they are shown on the screen, except for certain control sequences that start with \x19 (ESC); the terminal driver does something in response to them, such as moving the cursor or changing the current text colour to red, and processes don't see them directly. Additionally, the BEL character causes a beep instead of producing any visual output (usually).Terminals also have job control, which is what lets you, e.g., press Ctrl-C to interrupt a process group or Ctrl-Z to suspend a process group, and later resume it. Here, again, the terminal driver intercepts your keystrokes and sends SIGINT or SIGTSTP to the foreground process group. Job control is based on the fact that a process running in a tty is typically controlled by that tty, i.e., the terminal driver remembers (in kernel memory) which session it controls and which process group is in the foreground.All these cool features are implemented in the terminal driver, but even without them, a terminal device would still be a useful abstraction for the keyboard and monitor, with the terminal driver responsible for making entered characters available on the corresponding device file and echoing input and output characters to the monitor.Linux also has a system console, /dev/console. (POSIX actually requires that the system console exist, but doesn't specify that it must be a terminal.) This is where system log messages go. When you are in single-user mode, none of the ordinary ttys work, and the console is always your foreground terminal. The console differs from ordinary terminals in that it lacks job control (apparently).Pseudoterminals (ptys) are a bit more complicated. A pty is really a pair of devices; one master, one slave. The files /dev/ptya0 and /dev/ttya0 form a master/slave pair. There are a bunch of these, going all the way up to /dev/ptyzf and /dev/ttyzf, also a master/slave pair. The slave end of a pty behaves just like a real terminal. It may become a session's controlling terminal, if the session leader opens the slave device node.A pty driver has job control and other features, just like a tty driver, but it does not directly have access to the keyboard and display. Recall that in a real tty, entering input at the keyboard caused data to become available for reading on the terminal device file. With ptys, on the other hand, writing the data to the master end causes it to become available for reading on the slave end. And whereas, in a real terminal, writing to the terminal device file causes something to appear on the screen (usually), in contrast, writing to the slave end of a pty causes the data to become available on the master end for reading. In this sense, the pty is like a socket pair.However, the master and slave ends are not the same; one of them really is the master and the other the slave. The master has to be opened first; otherwise you'll get EIO when you try to open the slave. The slave end can control sessions, but the master end cannot. For if you echo a Ctrl-C character (\x03) to the slave end of a pty, for example, the master end receives it verbatim. But if \x03 is written to the master end, the pty driver sends SIGINT to the foreground process group of the session controlled by the slave end, and the character itself cannot be seen on the slave end. This is the same as how in a real tty, typing in Ctrl-C causes SIGINT to be sent, but echoing \x03 to the screen doesn't do anything (because it's a non-printable character).On the other hand, if \x0a is written on the slave end, the pty driver converts it to \x0d\x0a, just as a tty driver would, before the master sees it; on the other hand, on the master end, if you write \x0a, it passes through untouched. Again, this is intended to emulate real tty behaviour. When a process outputs a newline, \x0a, a carriage return (\x0d) and line feed (\x0a) occur; so this, too, is what the master end should see; in contrast to when translation is turned off and the master receives (\x0a) directly, which moves the cursor down one line but doesn't return it to the left of the screen. On the other hand, when you press Return on the keyboard, \x0a is what's produced, and \x0a is what the process should get.So the pty driver takes care of newline translation. And it takes care of job control. And it also takes care of stuff like suspending and resuming input and output with ^Q and ^S, if you have that enabled. That is, all the details other than "where does input come from" and "where does output go".Why are ptys useful? The most obvious example is that they are used by terminal emulators such as xterm. The xterm process itself opens the master end, and launches a shell that initially has the slave end as its stdin, stdout, and stderr. xterm will write the keystrokes you enter in the xterm window directly into the master end; that data goes through the kernel pty driver, which removes job control characters and and acts on them, and translates newlines and so on; then the shell, or whatever process is running in the shell, gets what's left as input. When output is written into the slave end, the pty driver doesn't touch job control characters, but still translates newlines; xterm reads it, parses the terminal control characters (such as colour codes and cursor movement commands), acts on them, and prints out the rest in the window. So xterm gets total control over what's read and written, but all else is left up to the driver.Another example is ssh. The ssh daemon (sshd) listens to a port (usually TCP 22) on the remote server. After you authenticate, it opens up a session for you. That is, sshd obtains a master/slave pseudoterminal pair, and runs a shell (usually) on the slave end, while itself keeping the master end. Whatever it receives on the master end, it sends verbatim through the network back to you; whatever keystrokes arrive for it from the network, it writes verbatim into the master end.A third example is expect. One common use of expect is to run a program in batch mode that normally requires input from a terminal, such as su. It obtains a pty and feeds the slave end to su. It writes whatever you tell it to write into the master end. su doesn't know that it's talking to expect rather than to a terminal emulator; all it sees is the slave end of the pty, from which it reads the password. So we see that here, in contrast to the other two examples, a pty can be useful without depending on the existence of a tty where the output actually gets displayed.(The /dev/tty?? and /dev/pty?? scheme has been superseded on modern Unix systems by Unix98 ptys, which are race-free. Here, a process wishing to obtain a pty opens the file /dev/ptmx and performs some system calls. The file descriptor that referred to /dev/ptmx becomes a reference to the master end of a new, unique pty, and a unique file /dev/pts/# is created as the slave end's device node. The latter disappears when the former is closed.)

Migrating from service based companies to product based companies is tough. Companies like TCS, CTS, IBM, Infosys have a very mediocre (if at all any) quality bar (which explains their number of employees), as a result of which employees find it very easy to be mediocre in terms of fundamentals and skills and can carry on for years. Grunt work is the norm in these companies, and gradual exposure to such work pushes the brain towards a state of non-intellect, and it becomes even tougher to migrate the longer you stay in these companies. No hope is lost though. You can still make it (I did!).Necessary disclaimers - Everything I am saying is based on my personal experience. I have worked in IBM India, following which I cleared Adobe and Amazon. I worked at Amazon for 3.5 years, following which I am a SDE 2 in Microsoft IDC, Hyderabad. My background is Electrical Engineering, and until 4th year I did not know programming at all, and scored a zero in my semester programming course. So if I can do it, no reason you cannot!Learn coding. When I say learn coding, I place very little (if at all any) emphasis of the language. One of the most common questions in Indian software sphere is - “Bro, what languages do you know? I know Java and C++”. This question is ridiculous due to a number of reasons. Firstly, language is very easy to pick up. When I joined Amazon, I did not know Java at all. From day one, I had to code in Java. I learnt it on the fly. You may learn Java, but end up working in Microsoft, where majority of the codebase is C++ and C#. What will you do then? You will always have to be prepared to know new technologies (be it languages like Erlang, or frameworks like Swift, or Cloud platforms like AWS/Azure) ad-hoc. If you are not quick to adapt to new requirements, you will never prosper in product based companies. Most of the people who claim that they know C++ will fail badly if they face 10 questions from a Scott Meyers book. Just knowing how to write a for loop in a language doesn’t mean you “know” the language. Secondly, language is the last thing interviewers look at. When I cleared Adobe, the role was for a C/C++ developer. And I knew neither, I wrote all interview answers in Perl and Python! So language is not important, pick up any one, code lots and lots of stuff in that language and become comfortable in coding.Which language to pick up? Any one of them, really. However, if you are looking for a job in Microsoft, you might as well be proficient in C++ or C#. If anything, your ramp up time after joining will be reduced. If you are looking for a Java developer position say in Amazon, may be Java. If you are looking for a web developer position, you have to be well versed in HTML/CSS/Javascript (although critiques go bonkers when HTML is called a programming language. Brace yourself!)2. Grasp computer fundamentals. This is where the cream is separated from the crop. You may ask yourself, I am working in Amazon, I will never need to write an OS from scratch. Why do I need to learn what virtual memory is, or in which scenarios an AVL Tree is a better balancing data structure compared to a Red Black Tree? Because while you will not need to use them directly, you will need to use higher level stuff that eventually use these internally, and your knowledge in these low level stuff will not only help you debug that nasty vtable error your precious C++ code is throwing, or determine whether clustered index is better suited in your scenario than a non-clustered one, it will also help you be a subject matter expert, which is of paramount importance if you are looking for a promotion. Sure, Google and Stackoverflow can always come your rescue, but if you, just like others, fire up Google to search for a solution when your junior comes to you with a problem, it doesn’t show that you are an expert at the subject, it just shows you are an expert at Googling, and the peer respect necessary for rising up doesn’t build up. So computer science is a massive field, what fundamentals you should be expert at? For starters:a. Operating Systems. You don’t have to know how to fork kernel code, debug device drivers and all that, but at least know the basics of how the memory system works, what paging and segmentation are, how caching is done, how processes are spawned, transferred, scheduled and called, how files are represented and stored, etc. Don’t just read the theory, go to Youtube and go through working examples to hit the lesson home. You don’t have to know the detailed intricacies of how a printer works, but if you answer is “Well sir, on clicking the print button, the paper gets printed” to the question “How do printers work”, you are being no different than your mother whose solution to every computer problem is to restart it. When the interviewer asks you this question - he is just verifying whether your fundamentals are in order, you are expected to at least say something about I/O devices, file streams, how the printable files are supposed to follow a generic protocol that can copy a stream to an output device so that the device can print anything that obeys that protocol regardless of what that file actually is, etc.b. Database - Just like language, this is another dicey area. People just learn how to form one or two simple queries, and they start saying that they know Oracle or MySQL. Don’t. You will get roasted in interview. My last interview round in Amazon was an excruciatingly tough one, requiring details of database index caching and optimization and internal data structures. I had to use every bit of my knowledge to clear that round. Was that necessary? Nope. The person who interviewed worked in the same team which I joined, and there never had been or in future were any requirement for database knowledge. He simply tried to roast me just to verify if what I had stated in my resume was true. Remember - this is not TCS, they won’t ask you to write a program to print your name to test your language skills. So you need to have a holistic knowledge of databases - how index works and what are the various types of index, where to use which one, how they are represented internally, how to optimize a given query, which join is better suited to a given query, how can stored procedure be used to make things easy, the caveats of a stored procedure, etc. An excellent book would be the biblical one on SQL Server by Kalen Delaney.If the role is geared towards a specific technology, then the fundamentals of that will also be required. For example, if you are applying for a SDE role in Microsoft Edge team, where majority if the work is in C++, you will be expected to be fairly expert in C++. So if you with great confidence answer, “Well, in the order in which they are initialized” to the question “In what order are member variables initialized in a constructor initializer list”, you have already messed up!3. Learn Software Design - This is most important if you are looking for senior roles based on experience, like SDE 2 or SDE 3. You may be the star performer in TCS, but you won’t clear even the first round in Microsoft if you are clueless about Object Oriented Design. Read, internalize the definitive book on designs by the Gang of Four. You will be specifically asked to design stuff - like design a bank ATM system, or a system of 10 elevators, you will be expected to use all your design knowledge to come up with a design which is clean, reusable and extensible. You will be asked why in a particular case, Factory Pattern is overkill, why in a given situation, Singleton Pattern makes sense, etc. These knowledge will be in requirement during practically every day of your work, so be sure that interviewers will grill you on this topic. It might be okay if you could not explain how exactly segmentation works in OS, but it won’t be okay if you could not write clean and reusable object oriented code.4. Learn about Data Structures and Algorithms. This is perhaps most important, although its importance gradually reduces as you apply for higher positions. Again, like everything else, it is a gigantic field. The interviews can also range from the tricky one to the unimaginably tough. I have seen Google interview questions which require knowledge of centroid decomposition. Will you face these questions, the likes of which generally appear in Topcoder or Olympiads? Probably not. If you do, you are applying for the wrong position. Coming back, the kind of questions which generally do come are abundant over internet. Grab some books like the one by Gayle Lackman, or browse through the examples at GeeksForGeeks and Leetcode. You will have a very good idea of what kind of questions do arise in interviews in Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. However, do not mug them up. You can be the best mugger of your generation, you will still fail in interview if you don’t get the concepts right. For example, in my Amazon interview 3rd round, I was asked a stock question - there are N players numbered 1 to N, and a function which takes two player ids as input and returns the winner in O(1) time. Use the function to sort the N players in the array in least time so that every player has won against the player on his left. I also gave the stock answer - quicksort, replacing the typical comparison operation by this function. I was feeling reasonably pleased until the interviewer (he was to become my manager) asked me its worst case scenario. That for a Quicksort is O(N^2). There are ways to optimize quicksort, but none could apply here because of the nature of the problem. He said it is possible to do it. If I had mugged up the solution, I would have had to give up. But I gave it some thought, finally came up with a solution based on AVL tree that reduced the worst time to O(N Log N). No amount of mugging up GeeksForGeeks and Leetcode could have prepared me for this. So how do you learn and practice?a. Grab hold of a good book on the topic. Preferably CLRS, or the one by Steven Skienna. Learn the fundamentals. How binary trees work. How binary search trees work. Where to use heap sort. What amortized time analysis is. What is meant by NP hard problems. How to find the shortest path between two nodes in a mesh. Etc.b. Go through the websites I mentioned. Many people frown upon them, do not listen to them. Go through the problems solved there, practice. Learn. Practice again. You may have written an immensely popular software for OS X like Homebrew, however Google will still reject you if you do not know how to invert a binary tree (this is a real life example. Google it!).Many people ask whether this is necessary. For example, in my three year work in Amazon, the most complex algorithm I had to use was a binary search. I never had to take resort to binary trees, or even linked lists, forget Red Black Tree! So why do interviewers ask you that tough binary tree algorithm even though your work will not require it? It is because these test your problem solving skills. One who can solve tough problems in an interview in such short duration is capable of solving big real world problems the company will be facing in short time as well - that is the idea.