Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

This should be first book for computer science student and engineers.

It's a lovely book. It fills the knowledge gap about how a computer actually works and understands our logic. It gives us the explanation for why we code the way we do!

Which is just shy of half way through. Phenomenal, incredible book. Petzold, what a guy. What a service to self taught devs like me. I think an early foundational book in any self taught devs library - one that's looking to give themselves a computer science education, anyway.

Being a tech enthusiast, I enjoy reading books that focus on building a solid foundation for coding and ML. This book starts with the very basics of the functioning of a PC and along the way builds a strong foundation for coding and ML. Reading this book was a journey that began with Braille code and Morse code and went to Logic Gates, Coding, and beyond. Here's a book named Code and yet Coding only begins way later in the book. And that is because the author has emphasized heavily building a solid foundation for coding first. And I find that to be so amazing! Reading the fantastic examples and explanations given by the author was super fun and interesting! He used everyday objects to explain the concepts. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this amazing book and would highly recommend it to those who want to understand the fundamental basics of the functioning of a computer system.

A very easy to understand book that teaches you very comfortably about computer language.

From my perspective (and there are other ways of looking at this book), Code is an amazing book that teaches you the internals of how computers work for non-computer-science grads who are self-taught programmers unaware of the details of digital computer architecture. It starts by using vernacular language and simple abstractions, gradually proceeding to fully unravel the mystery of the digital design underlying the computer architecture and the internet. Just one Chapter, chapter 13, from ASCII to Unicode, in my humble opinion, pays for the entire book, since this clarifies a lot of confusion that programmers have regarding character sets, encoding and the role unicode plays. Even the best stack overflow answer pales in comparison to Petzold's explanation of, for example Unicode vs UTF-8. But that's not all. Petzold takes you further, and helps you understand several topics underlying computers, such as memory, CPU, file systems and how sound and images are encoded. Building on all this knowledge, he takes you on a fascinating journey of fun projects such as building a clock, understanding how memory & CPU works, and the peek into the secret life that programs live after you compile them. All this using just layman's language that any logical person can understand.

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The paper and printing quality are extremely poor for such an expensive and important book. Don't be fooled by the 'Published by Microsoft' information on the product page. It is printed and sold by Repro Books India. The book also came in a damaged condition.

Im currently building my foundations in computers on a lower level one book at a time. I came into software engineering from a sales background. Over time, I’ve realised that while practical experience teaches you a lot, it can leave gaps in the deeper why behind how computers actually work and why software behaves the way it does. So I’ve been creating my own structured learning path to fill those gaps, starting from the ground up. The first book I chose is this one right here! It’s not a typical programming book. It starts with how humans first used codes to communicate through Morse code, telegraphs, and switches and slowly builds toward how those same ideas evolved into modern computers. What surprised me most is how much of computing is built on very simple logic. At its core, everything reduces to circuits making yes/no decisions and when you chain enough of those together, you get adders, memory, and eventually an entire processor. Reading it connected a lot of dots for me like how information becomes binary, how logic gates combine to perform arithmetic. It made computing feel less like magic and more like a long, logical sequence that starts with electricity and ends with the systems we work with every day. If you’re self taught, or you feel like you’ve jumped straight into frameworks and languages without really understanding what’s underneath, I’d highly recommend this book. It helped me see computers as one continuous chain of reasoning from Morse code to microprocessors.

Interessting, great book

One of the best, if not the best, books on computing… nice touch with the colored diagrams

Good concise write up on how hardware and software interact inside an Intel 8080 cpu.

Great book for a curious child or adult who wants to know how computers work. Less hands-on than Nisan and Schocken's book. Ideally, get both!