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Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

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Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#41

Post by shadowfox »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #27
sramsay wrote: post #22

Hmm. No one has mentioned Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Nissan and Schocken (which is absolutely superb).

Great suggestion. I flipped through Computer Architecture, A Quantitative Approach ( http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Fifth-Quantitati... ) at the bookstore the other day and it looked interesting, but that's all I could gather in the short time I had.

This is a standard textbook on computer architecture across many universities in the US (and if my students are right, outside it as well). So it might be worth a read.

If this is absolutely the first time you are looking at architecture, http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Fifth-Arc... by the same authors might be a easier entry point.

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#44

Post by brudgers »

sramsay wrote: post #22

Hmm. No one has mentioned Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Nissan and Schocken (which is absolutely superb).

Thanks, now I remember seeing nand2tetris [book companion site] on HN.

http://www.nand2tetris.org/

It's been reposted since.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=nandtetris#!/story/forever/0/nandt...

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#45

Post by benjaminpv »

Definitely interested in this. I think a common problem with a lot of people, even people that are taught from a book, is that you tend to get 'stuck' at the layer of abstraction you first learned.

People that don't want to develop their skills leave it at that whereas people that care look a little deeper and say 'oh, my knowledge has some pretty significant gaps...'

You can see this sentiment in a lot of the comments: everyone says 'I feel like I'm missing something.'

In my case, that realization came after I started doing some hobby electronics projects: once you start seeing how physical hardware interacts it set off a chain reaction where I realized that my knowledge was really deficient as to how you could go from such a low level to the level of abstraction with which I'm familiar.

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#48

Post by anupshinde »

I'd be interested. I taught myself to write an OS 10 years back (using floppy disks) and it was PITA. I tried it for fun few months back (just for fun) and even today, I find its not so easy. I would expect it to be < 150 pages, shows me how to write a boot loader "safely" to my USB disk and how to do the other interesting stuff you mentioned post boot - especially interfacing with eth0, wifi, bluetooth (and maybe gpu control)

Re: Ask HN: Would self-taught programmers be interested in such a book?

#49

Post by yblu »

Totally, but personally, I'd prefer a learning OS written by JavaScript, Ruby, or some other high-level language, but not C and assembly. That's because I'm interested in learning how OS works behind the scene but not in building a production OS from scratch. Having to learn C or assembly will be a distraction.
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