Let's Build A Compiler:
https://compilers.iecc.com/crenshaw/
Check on GitHub. Folks ported it to C, Go, etc. Then you may study standard textbooks like "Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools", "Engineering A Compiler" and so ond.
Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
21–30 of 30 posts
Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#22Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits & Gates to C/C++ & Beyond
https://www.mheducation.com/highered/product/introduction-co...
Is similar to nand2tetris. It uses a simple machine language, the Little Computer 3 (LC-3), and builds from the hardware up. Earlier editions are cheap, and don't include C++.
Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#23I highly recommend a fantastic indie game called "Turing Complete" (https://turingcomplete.game/)
Its basically a digital logic simulator/playground, masquerading as a game. Early levels have you solving a simple problem with a few and/or/not gates, then gradually building larger components like half adders, registers, RAM and eventually (I'm not there yet though) you end up with a complete CPU with an instruction set you have designed and implemented, and you are solving the puzzles by writing machine code (which you designed) programs for your CPU.
Its been featured on hacker news before:
Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#24This professor takes some pretty good notes for his CS courses: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/#classes
I might add that if you like the feeling of understanding a subject from top to bottom, if you haven't taken higher mathematics already, be careful... if you start studying math you might fall in love and have other subjects ruined for you. Colleges do us extreme disservices telling us basic calculus/linear algebra/diffeq are "math". Mathematics is like going from XOR (ZFC and basic set theory/logic) all the way up to the wildest things you can imagine.
I highly recommend anybody who enjoys the sense of complete mastery and "extremely nitpicky but capable of doing anything I can imagine" that computer programming tickles to try learning propositional logic, abstract algebra, and real analysis. Then graph theory, theory of computation, and actual algorithms research (ie whats in algorithms journals, though TBH stuff from a few decades ago is way more approachable and applicable). The guy I linked above has a great survey: http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/classes/202/notes.pdf.
It honestly took years after I finished grad school for it all to fully click to the extent it has with me now, but not only does higher math teach you to think in an entirely different way, it unironically teaches you the underlying structure of everything. Well, maybe it's not great at solving super fuzzy human problems but especially when working with computers, knowing about things like chaos theory in distributed systems, invariants, graph algorithms, structural isomorphisms, cryptography, analyzing your shit in a way that's actually statistically useful... it's everywhere.
Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#25Linux From Scratch: https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#26Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#27Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#28"Digital Design and Computer Architecture" by Harris and Harris
Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#29You might find "Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" by Charles Petzold intriguing. It takes a similar hands-on approach to explore computer fundamentals. Additionally, "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" by Randal E. Bryant and David R. O'Hallaron is another great read for delving deeper into computer architecture.
Re: Ask HN: What books or courses do you know similar to "From Nand to Tetris"?
#30Other people have mentioned ray-tracing in one weekend Complimentary to that I would recommend TinyRenderer https://github.com/ssloy/tinyrenderer/wiki This one is a CPU-based rasterizing renderer, it gives you a good understanding of what a GPU graphics pipeline does underneath. In the graphics world the two common ways of rendering things are either rasterization or raytracing. Raytracing is basically all the movie/…
Out of curiosity, is there a third way? The two you mention are the big ones, I know, but your phrasing implies (perhaps unintentionally) the existence of at least one more.
Well there's the "steer a beam across a screen" as used in CRT's (eg. older oscilloscopes) and the Vectrex game console.
Maybe one could consider lasershows falling in this category too?
See "vector display"