This is pretty good, but I feel like the gate level foundations of these concepts - AND, OR, XOR, NOT - is really crucial to getting a fuller understanding of what's happening in this overview.
That's what really pulled back the veil on system architecture for me, at least.
I was thinking the same. It's pretty nice how this useful info is so readily available these days to anyone with an interest.
I was in my second or third year of University before I was introduced to anything like this in any meaningful way. A 13 year old me would've loved to have stumbled on a GeoCities page with this.
I did a bunch of classes on VHDL in college and have thought about blogging about them as a refresher and a way to introduce digital building blocks to people who come from coding backgrounds. It's one of those subjects where, once you see the basics, you realize that the system as a whole is fundamentally very simple - it just happens to be running really, really fast.
I always felt very behind in college because I didn't know anything about electricity or programming or radio. Digital logic was refreshing because it was one of the areas that pretty much nobody knew about.
As a student tasked with designing a 16 bit RISC machine complete with keyboard and display, I found this to be a great way of introducing the material.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software[0]
My kids enjoyed this book, similar topic, but fairly playful in how it was put together and an extremely gentle introduction without actually shying away from how things actually work. It's hard to imagine a reader not coming away with a much better understanding of what computing is all about. It starts at gates and works up to actual (machine) code at the end of the book. Very good diagrams throughout.
Despite being from 2000, I don't think it's become outdated. I'd love it if there was a sequel that covered putting things together with a cheap FPGA.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 25.7 ms ] threadThat's what really pulled back the veil on system architecture for me, at least.
I was in my second or third year of University before I was introduced to anything like this in any meaningful way. A 13 year old me would've loved to have stumbled on a GeoCities page with this.
I always felt very behind in college because I didn't know anything about electricity or programming or radio. Digital logic was refreshing because it was one of the areas that pretty much nobody knew about.
My kids enjoyed this book, similar topic, but fairly playful in how it was put together and an extremely gentle introduction without actually shying away from how things actually work. It's hard to imagine a reader not coming away with a much better understanding of what computing is all about. It starts at gates and works up to actual (machine) code at the end of the book. Very good diagrams throughout.
Despite being from 2000, I don't think it's become outdated. I'd love it if there was a sequel that covered putting things together with a cheap FPGA.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa...