Great memories of this book, and of the period of my life I picked it up in. I was at coffee with my girlfriend saying I'd read you could make all the logic gates using only NANDs, so we got curious and wrote NAND on a bunch of napkins to see if we could figure them all out.
We did and it was great fun. For each gate we figured it with NANDs we would write the name of the new gate on a napkin.
We took the napkins and the joy of it home and sheet a few days we started combining those gates up as well, trying to eventually figure out an entire ALU. And so along came multiplexors and a bunch of other fascinating stuff.
Eventually we got stumped, but I'd heard about this book and we decided to order it. The rest of the chapters really did help us get an understanding of the low level that had always been mysterious to me as someone with software experience only.
Can't say I ever did make it all the way through in terms of building around, though. Once it got more into the low software levels I felt I already had enough of an understanding that the work didn't seem so appealing, but the read was still fantastic.
We did and it was great fun. For each gate we figured it with NANDs we would write the name of the new gate on a napkin.
We took the napkins and the joy of it home and sheet a few days we started combining those gates up as well, trying to eventually figure out an entire ALU. And so along came multiplexors and a bunch of other fascinating stuff.
Eventually we got stumped, but I'd heard about this book and we decided to order it. The rest of the chapters really did help us get an understanding of the low level that had always been mysterious to me as someone with software experience only.
Can't say I ever did make it all the way through in terms of building around, though. Once it got more into the low software levels I felt I already had enough of an understanding that the work didn't seem so appealing, but the read was still fantastic.