You press the power button. A second later a wall of text scrolls by, or a logo fades in, and eventually Linux appears. What happens in between is not magic. It is a careful handshake between tiny programs and a very literal CPU. This part follows that handshake until the very first line of C code inside the Linux kernel runs.
↫ 0xkato’s blog
Exactly what it says on the tin.
This is a good summary, and brings back the “old days”.
If you have done any low level work with DOS interrupts, assembly, or embedded programming, it would be very easy to understand. I however cannot put myself in the shoes of a novice to evaluate this. Maybe some diagrams could be helpful?