91–100 of 101 posts
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It's reasonable to support one great programming language along with Java, which is kind of a market standard.
I didn’t say it wasn’t reasonable, but it is a downside for those wanting to do something different. I’d prefer they tested emitted code, that way you can use anything you want.
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.
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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 f…
They actually call it "Hardware." If you look on the left of the thread linked website, you'll see a very nice "Table of contents." In this table of contents, it lists all the topics that the books covers. HARDWARE 1 Boolean Logic 9 2 Boolean Arithmetic 31 3 Memory 45 4 Machine Language 61 5 Computer Architecture 83 6 Assembler 103 These topics are fundamental to computer science. Boolean algebra is fundamental to co…
What country did/do you study in?
In the US, a research university intro course offering that's asymptotic to this book will almost certainly be promulgated by the EE side of the house for reasons like satisfying ABET accreditation requirements or EE programs generally being better postured to support lecture/recitation supplemented by a significant hardware lab component. At Stanford, see EE 108; CMU, 18-240; UF, EEL 3701; and so on.
At my undergrad alma mater, it was the only upper division EE course that didn't have a prerequisite. The senior lecturers who alternately steered the course were notorious for baiting would-be freshmen into taking it early as an effective means to cull the herd. What's funny is CS undergrad advisors publish a suggested sequence with a footnote calling this major course out by name with an explicit recommendation that it "be taken either by itself during the summer or with no more than 13 hours/credits during a Fall/Spring semester."
How does this compare to the NAND to tetris course?
do you need any external resources to go through this book?
The webpage https://www.nand2tetris.org/software has a link to a file, nand2tetris.zip, which contains projects and tools which are all one needs to go through the book (explained on this page). This open source software can be run on Windows, Unix, and MacOS. I've worked through most of the book on my Mac.
How similar is this book to CODE by Charles Petzold? I loved that book because it progressively builds up an imaginary computer using very easy to understand concepts. Even non-technical people can read it to understand how computers work internally.
The Elements of Computing Systems is a project-based course, starting with transistors going through building a computer and then an OS and software on top of it. Code goes deeper into the history leading to modern computers, but doesn't offer this project-based experience from the transistor level up. IMO, the two books offer a nice complement to each other.
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> past 2nd edition Case in point: the vomit-inducing colorful print of the 3rd edition of Axler's Linear Algebra Done Right .
Sorry that you do not like the color in the third edition of Linear Algebra Done Right. Most students find it useful, for example, to have definition boxes be a different color than theorem boxes. The color did not increase the price of Linear Algebra Done Right. New hardbound copies of the book usually sell for about $45 on Amazon, much less than most competing books. Furthermore, Linear Algebra Done Right almost al…
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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…
Thanks. This does sound very interesting. I wonder if there is any other place that offers a combination of many low level courses as well as game programming ones...Those Nintendo guys must be very cool. Did any of them work in the nes/snes period?
I don't know specifically of another school that focuses on this. However, one thing I found over my college career and you are probably already aware of is that often, if you make a connection with department faculty and prove yourself ambitions they are accommodating in how they will account credits.
You might consider finding a school with a friendly and flexible faculty and then see if they will allow you to pursue a CS degree replacing some of the CS courses with CE courses. Give your existing degree you would might find a fair amount of latitude since they won't feel they need to babysit your trajectory.
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>"The only thing that rivaled that lightbulb was aspects of Theory of Computation with undecidability, turing machine vs stack machine vs state machine powers that theoretically limit Von Neumann architecture." Might you or someone else have a title that you would recommend for this that is the equivalent of a "Elements of Computing Systems" style book?
I TAed the class for a while in undergrad and it was one of the few CS classes with a textbook that really actually helped and augmented the lectures/homework. The one we used was Introduction to the Theory of Computation by Michael Sipser (not hard to find a pdf online).