The JVM spec is a bit dry but readable: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se17/html/index.ht...

There's a very old but still pretty effective book called Programming for the Java Virtual Machine. Byte code is remarkably stable.

(Disclaimer: author)

There's a "cookbook" document in the repo, but it's not very comprehensive - I'd be more than happy to take PRs :) https://github.com/roscopeco/jasm/blob/develop/docs/cookbook...