Anything claiming to be "from the Bottom Up" and starting with Unix and Advanced C instead of Assembly cannot be taken serious.
Or automata theory and turing machines, for that matter.
Computer Science from the Bottom Up
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Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#12I read through couple chapters and enjoyed it. Does anyone have suggestions on other books dealing with this level of complexity?
Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#13On the first day of the first course as a CS major, the prof said something like "in this course you'll learn how computers work from the bottom up", turned to the blackboard, and wrote Maxwell's equations. We laughed, and he said, "You're laughing because I got it wrong, no? You need quantum mechanics for transistors".
We actually ended up starting at logic gates, flip-flops, and latches. But the joke was a great reminder that your floor is someone else's ceiling.
Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#14I read through couple chapters and enjoyed it. Does anyone have suggestions on other books dealing with this level of complexity?
I haven't read any of the chapters of this, so my comparison may be a bit off, but you might check out The Elements Of Computing Systems[1]. It goes from logic gates to compilers.
Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#15I read through couple chapters and enjoyed it. Does anyone have suggestions on other books dealing with this level of complexity?
I haven't read any of the chapters of this, so my comparison may be a bit off, but you might check out The Elements Of Computing Systems[1]. It goes from logic gates to compilers. http://www.nand2tetris.org/book.php
I thoroughly enjoyed this book but it doesn't go into near as much detail as I would like- it gives a vague, general concept of how things work and some pointers on how to implement them, but doesn't really go into real systems, often relegating major features to "optimizations", etc.
Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the intro: "Not everyone wants to attend shop class. Most people only want to drive the car, not know how to build one from scratch. Obviously any general computing curriculum has to take this into account else it won't be relevant to its students. So computer science is taught from the "top down"; applications, high level programming, software design and development theory, possibly data structures. Students wi…
Sure, but none of that has much to do with computer science. This should more accurately be called "bottom up Unix".
That seems intentional. This seems like it's trying to be a "fundamentals of Computer Science" type thing than actual Computer Science. It's the stuff you need to learn first before you can move into actual Computer Science.
Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#17I read through couple chapters and enjoyed it. Does anyone have suggestions on other books dealing with this level of complexity?
Modern Operating Systems by Tanenbaum, perhaps?
Here is the table of contents: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3K8J39AMWS64U/ref=cm_cr_dp_tit...
Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#18This is a really useful resource.
I've started to do something quite similar on my blog. I've been mentoring some web developers who only know html+css, and i've been using the time to write about the whole stack.
My goal is to build a roadmap, not to write a recipe book.
I've just started, but this is going to be a very useful reference for when I need to explain some of the more complex ideas.
http://daemon.co.za/2014/04/introduction-fullstack-fundament...
Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#19For someone who is just finishing CS this is great for recap. I printed the pdf and will go over everything I've learned in the past years.
Would've been nice if there was some "Theoretical CS Bottom-Up" too. From what I see this book doesn't have anything about computability, complexity, automata, algorithms, data structures, etc. Those abstract math-ish parts of CS are often overlooked by hackers, and are quite beautiful IMO.
Re: Computer Science from the Bottom Up
#20This is a really useful resource. I've started to do something quite similar on my blog. I've been mentoring some web developers who only know html+css, and i've been using the time to write about the whole stack. My goal is to build a roadmap, not to write a recipe book. I've just started, but this is going to be a very useful reference for when I need to explain some of the more complex ideas. http://daemon.co.za/2…
man, i really wish this went deeper into data structures and their nature, instead of just diving into binary math and c memory management specifics.
I'm not going to get as much use from this as I thought at first glance =/
does anybody know of any other good references to point people to when discussing the basics?