Ask HN: After Charles Petzold's Code and Nand2Tetris, What Next?

If you want to continue learning about computer architecture, I would recommend David Harris' and Sarah Harris' book "Digital Design and Computer Architecture", available in MIPS, ARM and RISC V editions.

https://pages.hmc.edu/harris/ddca/

An interesting second book that makes the connection to the software side is Bryant/O'Hallaron "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective"

https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu

...and, more on the theory side, both books by Hennessy and Patterson ("Computer Architecture: The Hardware/Software Interface" and "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach").

On the OS implementation side, I still like Comer's "Operating System Design: The Xinu Approach" quite a lot. While this book is quite old, I learned OS design from Comer (and am still teaching this at university level 30 years later...).

https://xinu.cs.purdue.edu

A good complement would be Cox/Kaashoek/Morris "xv6: a simple, Unix-like teaching operating system" (free download)

https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.S081/2020/xv6/book-riscv-rev1.p...

A useful addition on OS theory is Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau's "Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces" (also free)

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/

If you want to dig into programming languages, I would recommend Cooper/Torczon "Engineering a Compiler" (unfortunately published by Elsevier) and "Crafting Interpreters" by Nystrom (free)

https://shop.elsevier.com/books/engineering-a-compiler/coope...

https://craftinginterpreters.com

Finally, if you're interested in virtualization (system and bytecode level), I can recommend Smith/Nair "Virtual Machines"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9781558609105/virtual-mac...

I use many of these books in my courses and recommend them to my students - so far, they seem to like the books:

(My OS course at NTNU) https://multicores.org/tdt4186_22/

(My Compiler Construction course at NTNU) https://multicores.org/tdt4205_21/

I hope this helps a bit. Learning all of this will be quite a challenge but also bring a lot of fun! :)

Some thoughts:

1. https://www.amazon.com/Write-Great-Code-2nd-Understanding/dp...

2. https://www.amazon.com/Write-Great-Code-Low-Level-High-Level...

3. https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-RISC-V-A...

4. https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Ap...

5. https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-MIPS-Arc...

6. https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-ARM-Arch...

7. https://www.amazon.com/Models-Computation-Introduction-Compu...

Gautam - I started reading this book at the beginning of the year, but life got in the way and I dropped it since then. Though, last night I found myself with some time and picked it back up and read two chapters, "Bytes and Hex" and "An Assemblage of Memory" (yes, I have the first edition).

My email is in my profile. Feel free to shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss the material. I am planning on reading "The Elements of Computing Systems" next, a.k.a. nand2tetris - so I think it'd definitely be interesting to have someone to talk about these books to.

I recently started a Discord server with this purpose in mind -study CS books- we are currently reading another one of HN's favorites, Algorithms by Sedgewick. Though, we could definitely create a new section on the server to discuss more computer arch-y books and whatnot.

I hope you are able to join us! :)

Thanks a lot for these. Which CPU architecture would you suggest to begin with first?

Am sorry but I'm not sure what would be the right books/courses for each of the step. Can you please help with that too?