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I know you specifically asked for books, but I think these are too good to not mention.

Ben Eater has a series of Youtube videos that explores how computers work, starting from first principles, and in the process you build an 8 bit computer (or a 6502 computer in a different series). He actually sells kits of the parts to build it yourself, or you can buy the parts yourself.

It’s a deep dive into how computers work, but it’s very approachable. He’s an excellent teacher, and the video format works really well for what he’s teaching - it’s hard to imagine this working as well in book form.

Build an 8-bit computer from scratch: https://eater.net/8bit Build a 6502 computer: https://eater.net/6502 Let’s build a video card: https://eater.net/vga

I’ve watched a bunch of these videos in the past few weeks and I’ve learned so much from them. I can’t recommend them enough.



One thing I like about Eater is that he keeps mistakes that he's made in the content. He's not some rockstar, just a curious guy whose made a lot of very interesting videos.


Agreed. Watching him debug something is very enlightening. The whole idea of setting things up so that he can manually trigger clock cycles to step through what the processor is doing was awesome.


Do you just follow along with the videos or did you buy the kit as well? That 8-bit computer series looks great.


I haven’t bought the kit yet, but I’m going to in the near future.




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