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The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

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Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#71

Post by DubiousPusher »

GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #42
jpochtar wrote: post #5

Buy this book if you're a programmer who wants to know how computers work. I read the first edition in high school, and if I had to choose either this book or my entire undergrad CS education, I'd pick this book.

I have both a computer engineering education and have read the book. My recollection is that it's good for what it is but omits[0] a heck of a lot of necessary background knowledge to apply the material outside of the limited context of the book. I'm not saying that it's not good, just be aware that it's not the whole picture, so to speak. [0] or perhaps it would be better to say "has no choice but to omit" or it wou…

Coming from the pure CS side I definitely got this feeling. But the real value it provided me was to demystify a lot of what I was working on top of as a programmer. Not that I believe that working through this book has given me a complete understanding of the stack below where I work. I think a superscalar processor with a fat OS like Linux or Windows on top and several layers of drivers and firmware between is far far away from what this book teaches. But it did help me to stop thinking magically about a lot of what is going on. It's embarrassing to admit I once thought a lot of tools like debuggers and whatnot were doing some hocus pocus I couldn't hope to understand. This book really showed me that everything going on in a computer is capital D designed.

From your first projects in CS you're sitting atop a huge stack of tech. My own education was fairly low level compared to most CS programs. Several assembly languages, C, debugging crash dumps, register watches, etc were all part of my curriculum. Even still there is so much down below where I work it is hard not to think magically. Just being given a toy model of how all this doesn't but might work was extremely helpful. This may be why you might find CS majors more fond of this book than CE or EE.

Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#72

Post by DubiousPusher »

abecedarius wrote: post #32
ryanklee wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This second edition has been extensively revised. It has been restructured into two distinct parts—part I, Hardware, and part II, Software—with six projects in each part. All chapters and projects have been rewritten, with an emphasis on separating abstraction from implementation, and many new sections, figures, and examples have been added. Substantial new appendixes offer focused presentation on technical and theo…

Wasn't the first edition also in two parts (hardware then software) and with an emphasis on separating abstraction from implementation? That's how I remember it.

Yes on the first account. Kind of on the second. Each project had you finish in a way that would allow you to put it in a box and take it as an abstraction into the next one. That part worked well.

The part that was hard for me was that the book's language often muddled concept and implementation in the description of the project. This wasn't too much of a problem for myself as I went through this book several years after school. I had been working as a professional programmer for some time then and was used to disambiguating concepts and detail.

I know a lot of people work through this book as an undegrad but I must admit I doubt I would have enjoyed as much had I less experience. I can't speak to how much they've improved this aspect obviously and otherwise I found the book's language unusually clear for a textbook.

Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#73

Post by markus_zhang »

DubiousPusher wrote: post #71
GrumpyYoungMan wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have both a computer engineering education and have read the book. My recollection is that it's good for what it is but omits[0] a heck of a lot of necessary background knowledge to apply the material outside of the limited context of the book. I'm not saying that it's not good, just be aware that it's not the whole picture, so to speak. [0] or perhaps it would be better to say "has no choice but to omit" or it wou…

Coming from the pure CS side I definitely got this feeling. But the real value it provided me was to demystify a lot of what I was working on top of as a programmer. Not that I believe that working through this book has given me a complete understanding of the stack below where I work. I think a superscalar processor with a fat OS like Linux or Windows on top and several layers of drivers and firmware between is far…

Just curious what curriculum gave a low level CS education? Did you deliberately choose courses such as Compiler thoery and Operating System? In my school(I'm in first semester but join as a returner as I got a Stat master yrs ago) they are both optional and we can skip many low level courses.

Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#74

Post by DubiousPusher »

papandada wrote: post #19
jpochtar wrote: post #5

Buy this book if you're a programmer who wants to know how computers work. I read the first edition in high school, and if I had to choose either this book or my entire undergrad CS education, I'd pick this book.

As someone who programs without a CS undergrad background and always feels insecure about it, this sounds both very interesting and a very good deal.

If you are interested you should dig in. The very best thing about this book or at least its previous edition is that it is really really fun. The only other textbook I've enjoyed as much is PG's ANSI Common Lisp.

Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#75

Post by CalChris »

Koshkin wrote: post #59
Jtsummers wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what might be some good examples of that. IME, it's mostly been college textbooks which suffer from being refreshed for the sake of encouraging new purchases (killing the used market), often by someone other than the original authors and editors. Of course, some AD&D fans would say everything past 2nd edition might be an example of it.

> past 2nd edition Case in point: the vomit-inducing colorful print of the 3rd edition of Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right .

On a black and white Kindle, I rather like Linear Algebra Abridged. That might be different on paper and in color (always overrated).

Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#76

Post by DubiousPusher »

kolbe wrote: post #65
jpochtar wrote: post #5

Buy this book if you're a programmer who wants to know how computers work. I read the first edition in high school, and if I had to choose either this book or my entire undergrad CS education, I'd pick this book.

I had sort of the opposite experience. The book was really fun, but it felt a lot more like I learned how to play some abstracted low-level game. It just didn't do much to actually inform me about how a modern CPU actually works.

I think that is nearly exactly the purpose of this book though. It is not to teach you how modern computers work. That may even be an impossible task (as in I'm not sure any one person could hold all of that in their head at once). But by giving you a version of a computer you can completely understand, you can begin to relate to how various pieces of the technology you work with on a daily basis might work.

For example, the portions on virtual machines do not explicitly show you how the JVM works but they give you an idea for the conerns involved such as managing object lifetimes and whatnot.

Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#77

Post by DubiousPusher »

markus_zhang wrote: post #73
DubiousPusher wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coming from the pure CS side I definitely got this feeling. But the real value it provided me was to demystify a lot of what I was working on top of as a programmer. Not that I believe that working through this book has given me a complete understanding of the stack below where I work. I think a superscalar processor with a fat OS like Linux or Windows on top and several layers of drivers and firmware between is far…

Just curious what curriculum gave a low level CS education? Did you deliberately choose courses such as Compiler thoery and Operating System? In my school(I'm in first semester but join as a returner as I got a Stat master yrs ago) they are both optional and we can skip many low level courses.

Honestly, it was my school. I went to Digipen Institute of Technology. There are a lot of teachers there who worked for Nintendo which has a very old school dev culture. For example, the Wii U was literally their first console with an actual operating system. There are also a lot of Microsoft folks there who worked in jobs like Xbox dev support which gives one a pretty intense education in tackling low level problems.

These days I work far far away from that level and much of knowledge has atrophied but I often appreciate still understanding the concepts.

Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#78

Post by mikevm »

miobrien wrote: post #41

Course is available for free on Coursera: Part 1 - https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer (hardware projects/chapters 1-6) Part 2 - https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2 (software projects/chapters 7-12)

Do the lectures offer anything on top of just reading the book?

Re: The Elements of Computing Systems, Second Edition

#80

Post by wrycoder »

de_nied wrote: post #61
JonathonW wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This book follows more along the lines of the coursework for a computer engineering degree than a computer science degree-- especially at institutions where CS lives under the math or IT department as opposed to the engineering department. There can be a lot of overlap between the two, particularly on the software side of things, but CS curricula generally completely omit the electrical engineering portions of a CE c…

>This book follows more along the lines of the coursework for a computer engineering degree than a computer science degree > but CS curricula generally completely omit the electrical engineering portions Where in this book does it talk about electrical engineering?

The first half of the book is about digital design, which is part of electrical engineering. They call it "Hardware Land" in the book.

From page 6 (1st ed.): Of course the layers of abstraction don't stop here. Elementary logic gates are built from transistors, using technologies based on solid-state physics and ultimately quantum mechanics. Indeed, this is where the abstractions of the natural world,as studied and formulated by physicists, become the building blocks of the abstractions of the synthetic worlds built and studied by computer scientists.

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