Code

After reading Code my hacking skills increased considerably. I am never comfortable relying on abstractions so understanding more of the programming stacks I use increased my willingness to experiment with then. It also helped me to better understand pointers and memory management as memory became a real thing to me.

on HN, 2011

Seeing every step from the ground-up really helps demystify the machines you see around yourself every day.

on HN, 2011

If you didn't take, or have forgotten, classes like Computer Architecture or Digital Logic, this is a great book for getting your head around the low level details of what's happening in side a digital computer. Petzold starts from VERY basic examples (using a flaslight to morse code messages to your friend across the street) and slowly builds up to a full-fledged (if somewhat minimalistic) CPU.

on HN, 2017

So, by the end of the night, with proper questioning we'd gotten him to come up with MMIO, with virtual memory, with paging, and eventually gotten him to consider how to implement concurrency via scheduling and his newly discovered virtual memory mechanism.

on HN, 2011

It starts at simple circuits and builds up a picture of how computers work. It has really helped me get my mental models of what's going on inside a computer straightened out!

on HN, 2016