Comment by emschwartz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by emschwartz | Hacker News Reader

I loved this course and would strongly recommend it to anyone who works with computers that hasn't taken low-level CS classes.

This course does an exceptional job of giving you an intuitive understanding of some critical parts of how a computer works that affect higher-level programs and programming languages (for me the biggest aha! was grokking the difference between the stack and the heap). It is also incredibly fun to appreciate how magical it is that these complicated machines we use are just built from these simple circuits that you keep building up and building up through the course. Finally, the teachers did a fantastic job of simplifying what could be multiple semesters worth of material to quickly give you the gist of things like assembly languages, without oversimplifying.

Really can't recommend this enough if you have the time to do it. FWIW, the first part of the course (from NAND gates to building a CPU) is very fun and fairly easy. The second part (going from a computer to a full operating system) is quite a bit more work.

Is the online course and the book the same material? Trying to figure out if I need both or either.

Im currently taking this course without having the book and it works great. I might buy the book later but for me it’s important to have the imposed weekly deadlines in order to not just drift away and do something else instead.

The two online courses at Coursera are based on the First Edition of "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles": https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-P...

The most recent edition of this book is the Second Edition: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262539802/

To quote from the Preface concerning what the difference between these two editions is:

"The Second Edition

Although Nand to Tetris was always structured around two themes, the second edition makes this structure explicit: The book is now divided into two distinct and standalone parts, Part I: Hardware and Part II: Software. Each part consists of six chapters and six projects and begins with a newly written introduction that sets the stage for the part’s chapters. Importantly, the two parts are independent of each other. Thus, the new book structure lends itself well to quarter-long as well as semester-long courses.

In addition to the two new introduction chapters, the second edition features four new appendices. Following the requests of many learners, these new appendices give focused presentations of various technical topics that, in the first edition, were scattered across the chapters. Another new appendix provides a formal proof that any Boolean function can be built from Nand operators, adding a theoretical perspective to the applied hardware construction projects. Many new sections, figures, and examples were added.

All the chapters and project materials were rewritten with an emphasis on separating abstraction from implementation—a major theme in Nand to Tetris. We took special care to add examples and sections that address the thousands of questions that were posted over the years in Nand to Tetris Q&A forums."

I did the course without the book. I haven’t actually looked through the book, but the Coursera class was definitely enough on its own.

I'd recommend watching the course material and reading each chapter. It depends on a little luck which material clicks and how quickly, for me it varied from chapter to chapter whether or not I could get by with just the videos.

I first tried the course many years back, and didn't complete it (not necessarily only because it was in course form). Last year I bought the 2nd edition book, and found it more accessible, as a do it on your own time type of project, and as a reference while implementing the parts.

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