Ask HN: What are your favorite books about computer hardware?

6 pointsadambom13y ago2 comments

I'm a software engineer and I'd like to learn more about the hardware I work with. Are there any seminal volumes that really do a good job of walking an advanced computer user through how computers and microprocessors actually work?

How do processors actually do computations? What goes into designing a chip? What's clock speed actually mean? What are the different kinds of RAM and what are the tradeoffs?

Is there an equivalent of The Art of Computer Programming in the hardware world?

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s_kanev13y ago· 1 in thread

For an intro read, Hennessy and Patterson's "Computer Organization and Design" is good. Their other book, "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" is the de facto bible, but it's slightly more advanced, and not a good first read. Another good intro book is "Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" - especially for software people.

adambomOP13y ago

Thanks, I'll check out those titles. I wonder if they still have libraries these days?

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