From Nand to Tetris In 12 Steps

[eljugadorloco]

Mollastam

[MrMovieAnalyst]

If you want to get into the low-level physics/EE boundary stuff, e.g. how transistors work, what materials they are built of, etc., Fonstad's 'Microelectronic Devices and Circuits' is freely downloadable from MIT's Open-Courseware website. The caveat is that the math requires some elemental undertanding of calculus up to diff-e.q.'s - the book is heavily theoretically oriented. The 4 or so chapters on amplifiers aren't required to understand the later material on digital logic building blocks.

[littlesmithy1993]

haha he has some key board as me

[gustavoturm]

@littlesmithy1993 - Same - Keyboard

[JeffTheRambler]

I started this book and was fine up until clocks... then I was just lost.

[gustavoturm]

@JeffTheRambler Why?

[Arminius1871]

The book doesn't exist in other langueges like German, does it?

[gustavoturm]

@Arminius1871 Guess not, according to the site: (Second Printing: 2009, Chinese Edition: 2006, Polish edition: 2007, Indian edition: 2009 )

[CSryoh]

This would have been perfect if it was C, not jack.

[Insidetheasylum]

@CSryoh As someone's who's almost done with the book -- the language jack is structured so that it's considerably easier to write a parser/compiler for it. Doing anything with C requires a lot of background information and jack just isn't at that level.

[suyangsong]

shimon shocken, i swear to god first time he said his name i thought shimon SOUKOUKEN or something...

[Vaughnlesterinoz]

I am looking into this for sure. I have about a year or more between school which I finished last year and my next goal, university, because I can't afford to go yet. And I really want something to keep my mind active until then. And having a headstart with this knowledge will really help when I do eventually get to university.

[ToshiroDK]

Your link to the publishers website is broken. You might want to fix that :-)

[Minecraftmonkeys]

@ToshiroDK the link is www1. and then the adress :)

[Blo0dMeN]

MinEcRaft is created ... You can make a real man in some game with feelings with brain thats fucking SCARY

[gustavoturm]

@Blo0dMeN Afraid of Skynet?

[dardamavet]

That's nice, but you don't get to actually build a physical computer, do you?

[Seefood73]

@dardamavet you could, but that's more than 12 lessons, ain't it?

[gustavoturm]

@dardamavet Actually, you can read something like this in the beginning of the book: "First we start with abstractions, then we find components that make this computer mounting plausible" The software that "comes" with the book is just an easier way to get that. Otherwise you would have to buy lots of IC's/Transistors/etc. The real idea behind a computer is on this abstractions, after that you really can mount it on everything, transistors, quantum particles and biochips.

[vkinfinite]

amazing stuff...thrilling!!!

[Scuddlefish]

This book is amazing. I definitely suggest it to anyone interested in computers that has at least just a little programming experience. :)

[Auxon]

Sounds very interesting.

[pmurygin]

WOW!

Does Prof. Shimon Schocken teach at MIT?

[floopy312]

I think that the old way of teaching IT and CS sometimes can get so boring and inefficient... universities and colleges must step forward and design new smarter curricula based in these innovative approaches.

[philocompute]

This is just an advertisement.

[floopy312]

It doesn't matter because he is a genius!!

I'm going to buy that book as soon as possible...

[xapha]

might be worth buing.

i just started studying microsystems engineering

in regensburg, germany.

its all based on this sort of thing (so far at least :))

[settlein]

I'm reading on an translated Chinese version currently.

Appreciated!thanks!

[goscha10]

I really advise everyone who is interrested in computers to buy this book. Personaly I love IT and all about it so I started study IT. The idea was good but first this book showed me how it works. I was really happy to be able buy this book and start to build my own pc, this how students should start study IT, first get understanding how it works inside and then find out new things about this amazing IT world.. and to Prof Schocken BIG RESPECT - thank you.

[Oh4Chrissake]

@goscha10 Hi. How much programming experience is actually required?

[brandonman94]

Sounds pretty cool. It might be a little cooler if it was actually built in hardware, not just software.

[hyperthreaded]

Indeed, one of the biggest challenges when familiarizing oneself with a complex system is understanding its layering structure. Documentation writers should also think about this -- documentation for a large piece of software or, say, an IEEE standard, is more readable if the author makes the layering of the system explicit. Read the PATA spec for an example of how not to do it :-P. A CS course like this that takes a kind of "cross-cutting", bottom-up approach sounds like a brilliant idea.

[TheRealFallenDemon]

That is an awesome idea. Good work :D

[Lumbergh42]

Wow! Sounds like the kind of teaching I would have enjoyed when I started studying. The fascination that drove me to computer science is just taken away by the classic way of focussing for too long on one aspect (like algorithms, data structures, etc.). I don't want to study for years and then suddenly go "Aha! Now I see how the puzzle fits together!". I will look into this!