Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold (1999-10-23)

Seriously, if you are the kind of person who needs to understand where things came from to really understand them, this is a great book. It is truly a book on code, and not just "how to code" or "what to do with code" but "what on earth is code" and where did it come from. It explains computers and computing in more usable terms than more technical books on the same subject because it focuses on history and scope rather than technical depth. For a reader like me, who asked every teacher from elementary school through college "why do we count to 10" and clung to the best answer of "it's arbitrary - it's just how it's always been done" until reading this book (and who struggled to convert binary to base ten), this book was gold. Pure gold.

I'm an electronics engineer so basically I was not expecting to find much new stuff of this book when I first browsed the table of contents, however after some reading I've got to love it very quickly. Yeah, chances are that most of the devices described along the pages are familiar to many people, specially for those with education in engineering, but the way this book takes you from one to the next is as natural that new relationships start to be apparent right away and then, you finally got it !!. This book is a very nice mix of technical and historical, it will use your interest in electronics to tell you the whole story from the Morse code to the microprocessor. As I read I learned more about the many difficulties that our peers from the past had to deal with to solve their problems and, ultimately, create the technology of today.

Okay, so I'm only 30 pages into this book but I'm hooked. I started taking evening IT classes to get into a different career and ran into some issues in my A+ certification went they kept using volts, amperes and other terms that I only had a vague idea of what they meant. This book gave me a more solid understanding of these terms, so much so I saved a friend $85 dollars that he was about spent on a starter for his car. I saw immediately that the cable wire attached to the battery was missing a few inches of electrical tape, leaving the copper exposed. This book taught me that electricity does not ran very well through air, so we went to Auto Zone and bought some electrical tape to cover the exposed areas, making sure enough electricity is getting to the battery. I didn't think it was going to work but the car started right up! For a noob like me this was a big deal. This author created a strong interest in me for chemistry, which would of been real helpful years ago but oh well. I enjoyed his intro into Morse code and Brail as it felt he was conditioning readers to grasp idea how computers received and process information. Brail was very interesting as he pointed out how certain markers will alert a blind person to cease interpreting letters and switch over to numbers, than another nullifier to switch back to letters.

This is a good book. I am teaching a class and using this as the text. It's at a pretty good intro level and many of the students seem to like it a lot. I liked it because it's more of a novel than an actual text, it gives a good background to many of the topics I'm teaching, and I can go in depth into other topics and ideas that are related to the concepts described in the book. I don't cover the whole book and some of the chapters are harder to understand than others, but I do like the book overall.

Understanding what's going on at the core of your code can never hurt, and this is the most interesting way you could ever learn about it. Chapter by chapter, it subtly builds on concepts taught to you in previous chapters.The book arranges a surprise for you somewhere in each chapter, wherein you realize what you've been learning about is a concrete topic of study. For example: the book teaches you how current passes through a switch and to a light bulb with a simple drawing, then it incrementally builds the diagrams to be more complex, until at some point it's revealed that you know how circuits work, and that you're now fairly familiar with circuit diagrams. From end to end, you begin at Morse code and eventually land on CPU schematics.

This walked me through computers from concept to how the circuits work to how the different components work together. Very helpful for me, an adult who didn't grow up with computers, to understand how they actually work. Interesting for those who want to know the nitty-gritty details of circuits and computers and why they work.

Was looking for a book that could explain how a computer really works from scratch but never found one until I found this book thinking it’s just another typical computer book. This book is perfect explaining how computer works starting from hardware to software only for the beginner or someone who wants to know how exactly a computer works and the theory behind it. Wish I had read this book when it was published (year 2000).