The first question has had a semi-famous answer from this post in 2011: https://plus.google.com/+JeanBaptisteQueru/posts/dfydM2Cnepe I'd be interested to know what if any books people recommend as well, though my own strategy is when encountering a black box, and desiring to learn about it, I learn about it using whatever resources I can find to make it transparent (often revealing many internal black boxes...). Occasionally online I'll find someone who made really good visual diagrams that help summarize a thing that I might not have found otherwise in a book, e.g. http://code.google.com/p/corkami/wiki/ELF101 or http://brendangregg.com/linuxperf.html