0.2 The series: OS → networking → security → AI, in Python

This guide belongs to one course. The systems series gives you the machine, the network, and the threats; the AI guide gives you models. Python is the language you will use to automate the first three and to build the fourth.

   1  OS & Linux  ──▶  2  Networking  ──▶  3  Security  ──▶  4  HTTPS  ──▶  5  AI / ML
                         2a OSI map          3a From Zero      (one request    from classical ML
                         2b TCP/IP           3b In Depth        end to end)    to LLMs and agents
   ════════════  Go, Rust and Python alongside every step  ════════════

   Languages track:   Go  ──▶  C  ──▶  Rust  ──▶  Python  (you are here)
                      GC +     the       safety      the glue language:
                      runtime  machine   by compiler readable code over fast native libraries

Why Python comes after the systems series. Python hides the machine well. That is why beginners like it, and why experienced engineers get surprised by it in production. When your data loader is slow you need the OS guide's page cache. When a training job gets OOM-killed you need OS Ch 13. When requests.get() hangs you need TCP from the networking guide. And when someone sends you a model file, you need deserialization attacks from Security in Depth, because a PyTorch checkpoint can be a pickle that runs code. This guide assumes you can follow those links when it uses them.

Reading paths:

• New to programming: Part 0 → Part I slowly (do every exercise) → Ch 13–21 → Part VII Ch 53–56 → the AI guide.
• From Go or Rust (backend / systems engineer), heading to AI: §0.3 → Ch 1–2, 5–7 → 13–18 → 25–29 → Part VII → Part VIII.
• ML engineer / data scientist who learned Python informally: Ch 2, 5–6, 13, 15–18, 20–21, 25–28, 31 → 53–62 → 71. Chapter 2 alone will explain several bugs you have already hit.
• Security engineer: Ch 1–9 → 33–34 → 40–45 → Part VI → 64.
• SRE / platform: Ch 1–12 → 19 → 21 → Part IV → 43–44 → 68–70.