Found in 2 comments on Hacker News
pjmlp · 2022-04-05 · Original thread
Before C and C++ became widely acceptable for game development, we used to read these bibles like these,

https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book

https://www.amazon.com/PC-Intern-Encyclopedia-Programming-De...

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Art-Game-Programming-High-Speed...

Very little regular C and C++ code, plenty of inline Assembly.

pjmlp · 2022-03-26 · Original thread
You would buy books like this one,

https://www.amazon.com/PC-Intern-Encyclopedia-Programming-De...

Borland debuggers were quite good.

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