This repository contains various primers on important information technology topics, such as Linux, free and open source software, the TCP/IP stack, and peer to peer networks.
The topics were selected on the basis of their relevance for people who are diving their way through the Bitcoin rabbit hole, and are finding that insufficient general knowledge about information technology is proving a signficant bottleneck.
One main topic that is missing in this repository is a discussion of cryptography. If you want to learn more about this topic, you can consult my introduction to cryptography (https://github.com/JWBurgers/An_Introduction_to_Cryptography).
While I created this repository specifically to support people interested in Bitcoin, anyone else is, of course, also free to use all the information to their benefit.
Any Bitcoiner that needs to brush up their general knowledge on information technology will probably face one or both of the following frustrations:
- Many of the discussions are either very high-level or extremely specific.
- Quality information about many of these topics is scattered.
My aim with this repository—complemented by my repository on cryptography—is to have some in-depth introductions to the most Bitcoin-relevant topics on information technology all in one place.
Writing these primers on information technology was much more difficult than I had anticipated, so your help is more than welcome.
Please have a look at the contributions file in the repository for some guidelines on how to support the project.
My initial goal was to make all the primers completely self-contained. That, however, proved fairly inefficient, as I would be re-introducing the same content in multiple primers.
So, the numbering system on the primers indicates the most logical order for working through them. That said, I have attempted to make the primers as free-standing as possible, so people can still jump to particular primers just to learn about specific topics.