Code: Charles Petzold

[devenglish]

This book introduces us to “The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software” in an outstanding way for anyone who’s ever wondered about the magic and secret inner life of computers and how the working of these complex systems and other smart machines.

Nowadays the low-level details get masked due to the level of abstractions but if you go through this book you can understand those awesome older technologies like Morse code, Braille, and Boolean logic, to understand vacuum tubes, transistors, and integrated circuits. Sometimes to solve a very complicated bug you have to drive deeper to the dead ends of the electronic, binary computer with a von Neumann architecture to reach a scalable solution. It also easily explained many recent developments topics, like floating-point arithmetic, operating systems, packet-based communication protocols, and GUIs.