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Seriously. After reading this book I realized that I didn't understand shit about computers before. Wondering what the second edition adds.

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Logged in to say exactly this. I thought I understand computation after my degree, and this book, while far from perfect, did an incredible job of bringing fundamental computation to life in the readers mind.

I'm looking forward to diving into the second edition and hoping the second half is better than the first edition.

I feel like computer science degrees rarely get into much of the hardware beyond some basic assembly. You might have benefitted from taking some computer engineering courses which cover the topics in this book in much greater detail.

> basic assembly

Even some people actually working on compilers still talk about pipeline stalls in a ye olde pentium/RISC sense rather than the out of order monsters we have today.

Interesting my CS degree had a required introductory Computer Engineering course which itself had a pre-req first year course where we learned digital logic (among other stuff).

We didn't go quite as far as this book seems to but definitly got a decent grounding in how computers actually do their thing before it was back to theory.

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