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5 estrellas
The book goes very meticulously goes through how to build a "modern" CPU (modern meaning most of an Intel 8080, specifically). I'd say I had a pretty firm grasp on what logic gates were before and how they work, as well as binary/hexadecimal encoding, which is the topic of the first few chapters but still found that the book gave some new perspectives and was overall an enjoyable read.
After that you get into the meat of the potato, when he starts making circuits that add and subtract numbers together. These parts are still quite easy to grasp and in my opinion extremely fascinating, at this point of the book I was absolutely in love with it. When he later gets to building the ALU, I find that the approach breaks down a bit. The explanations are still excellent for this part, but it didn't take me long to get …
The book goes very meticulously goes through how to build a "modern" CPU (modern meaning most of an Intel 8080, specifically). I'd say I had a pretty firm grasp on what logic gates were before and how they work, as well as binary/hexadecimal encoding, which is the topic of the first few chapters but still found that the book gave some new perspectives and was overall an enjoyable read.
After that you get into the meat of the potato, when he starts making circuits that add and subtract numbers together. These parts are still quite easy to grasp and in my opinion extremely fascinating, at this point of the book I was absolutely in love with it. When he later gets to building the ALU, I find that the approach breaks down a bit. The explanations are still excellent for this part, but it didn't take me long to get lost. There were still some takeaways from it, but to me at least it's the wrong medium and needs more hands-on experience (I did not use the webpage by the way). If you also get lost at the ALU, my advice is to push through because it does get better again when he gets into machine code. The last few chapters of the book, added in the second edition from what I understand, are quite useless in my opinion. You get a basic JavaScript tutorial and some instructions on how to use a web browser.
So, the book is not without its problem, but for me it's still an easy 5/5. I came into it having always wondered how on earth one can connect a series of NAND-gates to build anything even resembling a fully functional computer, and I feel I came away from the book with a decent understanding despite not fully understanding everything in it. I think it definitely contains everything you'd need to build a tetris, if so inclined.