Ask HN: Best book for understanding hardware-software interface

One of the best ways would be to build a computer yourself. For that I haven’t found anything better than ECS [1]. Please try to build your own extensions to ECS and don’t forget to burn your computer to FPGA.

Follow that up with Computer Systems A programmers perspective.[2]

My review of ECS [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-P...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspect...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RZ4ME4QH22JML/ref...

You should definitely checkout this book - http://www.buthowdoitknow.com/

It explains everything in layman's term.

That sounds like a simple question but the answer is very complex. I recommend you look at old technology that was more simple and easy to understand, and then start moving forward. Look at the S100 bus and how simple 8 bit microprocessors such as the Z80 and 6502 did IO.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-100_bus

https://z80journal.wordpress.com/2015/10/07/z80-io-space/

Then with x86 PC age, look at the ISA bus first https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture

and later on, the PCI bus (should I even mention Microchannel?) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI

Another direction for computer IO might be to learn about the Raspberry Pi GPIO interface: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/raspberry-gpio/all

Get an 8 bit microcontroller dev board for a few bucks and learn how to control the peripherals. AVR are good and there is a lot of material online to learn from. Sorry I don't know any books.

I recommend CSAPP, even though I'm not sure it's what you want: https://csapp.cs.cmu.edu and Inside The Machine.

I'm surprised there's no mention of the classic Computer Organization and Design by Patterson and Hennessy. Combine that with a recent book on the Linux kernel (either the O'Reilly one or I think there's one from Addison-Wesley) or the BSD red book (design and implementation of 4.4 bsd I think it's called) and I think you'd have good coverage of the topic.

While not exactly what you have asked for, I once delivered a related session intended for software developers -- "How Does a Processor Execute My Code? And Why?!" If the slides for this would be of interest, reach out to me using contact information in my profile.

I would buy a raspberry PI and start with that, or an Arduino.

There is a Arduino simulator (I have not used it, others told me about it) on Tickercad.