Code

As many other reviews said, the first part of the book is a brilliant, entertaining, easily understandable & accessible overview of underlying topics that relate to how "codes", electronic signals, alternate number systems & computers came about.The latter sections are considerably more dense, and required going back a few times, tracing the circuit diagrams with my finger, and Googling the finer points of electrical circuitry, how to do math in binary, octal, and hexadecimal, and other assorted topics covered in this wide-ranging work.I had classes a LONG time ago in electrical engineering, as well as a good amount of experience with binary, hex(adecimal), and programming, so given that background I could follow along fairly easily & connect the concepts to my existing knowledge. If you don't have any background at all in EE, Comp Sci, or programming, be prepared to re-read & re-re-read the chapters on logic gates, circuits, and how these bits of hardware physically compute & store basic arithmetic values in order to perform complex tasks. Those sections were the most challenging, but ultimately for me provided the most valuable information because it helped fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle in my prior knowledge.For anyone who wants to "learn to code," but you find yourself confused by or not really bothering to understand concepts like pointers, memory addresses, Boolean logic, or esoteric & ancient magic spells like "XOR" or Assembly Language, this book does an excellent job of explaining in real, physical hardware terms exactly what those mean and how they work.My only critique is that after ALL that fine-grained detail & historical backstory for most of the book, the final chapter crams roughly the last 40 years of computing into a few short pages, covering everything from Graphical User Interfaces & image compression to the internet & (rather outdated) descriptions of web browsers. It felt rushed & tacked on.I'd really like to see an update, or a companion book, that covers newer topics in such detail as the first half of this book.Overall though, this was a fantastic, educational if at-times-dense read. I had to work at it a bit, but that was the point.If you hate to read, don't want to learn, and are too lazy to work at it - buy it anyway to give him another $15 and then write a review explaining why it's the book/author's fault :P

This book has a special place in my heart. I started my career working for one of the big box software service companies and the work I was exposed to was of a pretty boring nature i.e. repetitive work with no room for any thought; the focus was on doing things mechanically without understanding what the thing is all about. Moreover, my educational background was mechanical/industrial engg and hence I entered the field without knowing much about the field of computing. So that was my introduction to the field of computing and the combination of these factors was disastrous; soon I lost my interest in the field and I was terribly depressed. Later on I moved to other functional areas (product mgnt, project mgnt, prod mktng etc) thinking that my salvation would be there since I thought I would be able to get a broader view of the problem we are trying to solve (as opposed what I was exposed in the engineering side). After making a few trips along that route I realized my salvation is not going to come from that side either. Along the way I tried to figure it out myself and after going through a lot of introductory books (with explanations in a piecemeal manner which I found to be unsatisfactory) I somehow stumbled on this book...and this is the book that kindled my interest. I have since then read numerous books on computing that I found to be extremely interesting, but without the spark provided by this book I would still be in the dark.The nice thing about this book is the approach of moving forward in time from 1850's or so onwards to the end of 20th century, starting from simpler technologies and progressively moving to complicated ones. The author starts with an explanation about morse code, braille system, telegraphs (and even a primer on electricity), number system, boolean logic before moving onto to logic gates, half adders, full adders, doing subtraction, edge triggered flip flops and more. All the components and ideas that form part of the hierarchical abstraction of the machine is explained in minute details. I remember spending a lot of time thinking up many circuits using the concept of logic gates described here. The chapters on memory, automation and microprocessors is simply brilliant and the detailed sketches of the varying states of these components makes it very easy to comprehend. Towards the end of the book the author seem to increase the pace a bit and the final chapters such as operating system and graphical revolution does not seem to have the same kind of magic that the middle ones had. I suspect the author was wary of making the book too huge and thereby losing the interest of the reader.This book is targeted at someone who truly wants to have an understanding of computers, i.e. if you believe that software, hardware, processors, network, high level, low level, etc etc cannot be looked upon as isolated silos, then this book is for you.