Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

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.

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.

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.