Noam Nisan

The five stars are really for the textbook plus the course materials, including video lectures and projects. This filled a ton of gaps in my understanding. Since I was a math major, I'd never had architecture, compilers, programming language design, systems, etc. Just the basics of application programming and computer graphics. Bought this a few years ago after reading about it on HackerNews. Read the first couple of chapters right away, set it down, forgot about it. Rediscovered it when I moved recently. Put it on my desk for months, then while searching Coursera for something completely unrelated, stumbled across the authors' class, which has split the material into two sections, roughly into a hardware stack and a software stack. For having no knowledge of hardware, I found the first section surprisingly doable with a reasonable time commitment. I spent way more time and effort on the software stack, including a ridiculous amount of time hunting down a jump-less-than which should have been a jump-not-equal in my assembler. But, I've now written an assembler, not to mention a compiler.

Which error I made because I didn't read closely enough. The book rewards close reading. In that sense, it takes after K&R C, being about the same thickness and directness.… (altro)

The first part of the book describes the logic which is necessary to construct a simplistic computer from NAND gates, data-flip-flops, a clock, and IO-interfaces. The second part describes how to write (in a given higher-level language, like C++) a simplistic compiler which generates machine code for the computer from part one.

The book is well-written and very understandable. The exercises, which are are nicely integrated into the text, are insightful.

The authors do not get tired to say that the book teaches to build a computer from NAND gates, but I find this somewhat boastful because (a) as mentioned above also data-flip-flops, ... are taken for granted and (b) you are only simulating the logic in an emulator which means you are not building anything.… (altro)