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Comment by julianpye | Hacker News Reader

Slightly OT, but If you haven't heard about it before Charles book 'Code' is one of the best computing books I have ever read. I gave it to my engineer father and my MBA brother for Xmas years ago, as it is such a great introduction for anyone to understand how computers work. You will also need a copy if you ever were trying to build a computer from scratch :)

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Code is, in my opinion, always relevant when talking about Petzold. After hearing it mentioned by some podcast pundits I enjoy, I picked up a [dead tree] copy from Amazon. It is a beautiful and well written book.

In some ways, the bookcraft it expresses reminds me of Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information. But Petzold clearly is drawing more heavily on story-telling traditions making the book readable even for someone less interested in the technology.

This is in my [long] list of books to read... Could you please clarify if it would be useful for experienced people as well? (i.e. who have a good understanding of how computers work from software perspective - had written in asm, etc...)

I had been a professional programmer for 10+ years when I read it and it was full of those moments of clarity where disparate things I 'knew' came together and made much more sense.

Nice. And do you think it will be good as a first book as well?

Depends on the nature of the reader, but for some people I have hired who were gifted coders (right out of the gate knew how to approach problems) I would often give it to them on their first day and they ate it right up.

The book is really about building a CPU from transistors. If you already know how memory and an ALU work, you probably don't need to read this book. It is incredibly well-written though, and you might just enjoy it nontheless ;)

CODE is my favorite non-fiction book, but I actually don't think "useful" is the right word. I do think that no matter how experienced you are, it is an enlightening and joyful read. It is less about what the book covers than the approach it takes.

What makes the book worth recommending is not so much the subject matter, but the quality of Petzold's explanations. We're all interested in computing and many of us have seen NAND gates before...Petzold tells one story where Boolean logic goes on a journey and becomes NAND gates. Sure there may be a few new facts we meet along the way, yet what makes Code a great book is the quality of its writing.

It's worth reading as a writer. For someone interested in computers, it is recreational as well.

Code is a brilliant book, but I am not sure if the "non-technical" people will enjoy it beyond a point. The part where starts talking about flip-flops can be pretty complicated for someone who is not too interested in technology.

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