Review: Code by Charles Petzold

Code by Charles Petzold provides a compact bottom to top overview of how computers really work. And what technically the difference between hardware and software is.

Petzold starts with some real life examples and adapts them to our computers. After this introduction electrical circuits are build to a working CPU with an ALU and memory. And within this you’ll see how they are really working and bound together!

Furthermore there is also a chapter to my beloved topic of clocks!

The second edition was fully revised and provides a website with interactive circuit examples.

My university had more a practical approach on computer science and software engineering. But I think book is a good introduction and reminder of how things really work and what had been done in the past 100 years that we don’t need to work with assembly or binary anymore.

If you are interested in how computers work this will give you the needed knowledge.