OS programming requires looking up documentations of various sorts, e.g., ISA, hardware interfaces, compilers, architecture. Often times, the lengthy manual is the only reference that is available. Pintos is a small and simple OS. But in doing the projects, you will run into many situations where you need to look up some documentation. This course will be one of the few courses where you will be reading a lot of documentations, which hopefully helps you become efficient at it and write better documentations later. For the listed references, you don’t need to go over them from beginning to end at once unless it’s recommended so.
Bracketed notations in Pintos source code comments can be looked up in the Bibliography. The corresponding manual (e.g., ELF specification) will be fount in the link of the Bibliography.