Frequently I find myself wondering how to learn to do something that doesn't seem to fall into any obvious category. To be clear, I am not asking for the best way to learn it, or for a book/off-site resource, but rather which topics should I look up and understand to reach my goal.
For example, I would like to learn to figure out by myself how exactly C++ lays out the memory at a register level, given the source code for a program and the source code of the compiler used to compile it.
I do not know how to approach this problem, or to which specific domain it belongs. Do I learn assembly? But C++ compilers are not written in assembly. Computer architecture? Surely, not the entire field of computer architecture.
Do these questions belong on Stack Overflow despite the following rules?
Your questions should be reasonably scoped. If you can imagine anentire book that answers your question, you’re asking too much.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a book, tool, softwarelibrary, tutorial or other off-site resource are off-topic for StackOverflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam.Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solveit.