I really enjoyed learning x86 assembly in college, and I'd highly recommend others give it a try. If you focus on the core essentials (e.g. the reduced instruction set from the 8086), it's a small and fun toolkit.
Learning assembly and creating my own simulated processor using multiple layers of logic gates was one of the main cornerstones of my college education. I remember when things finally "clicked" and I finally understood how computers worked on a fundamental level, I was positively giddy for days.
Unfortunately, our technology has become increasingly complex. For a while I tried my hand at learning more about modern processors, but found it far too overwhelming. Maybe I just didn't know where to look for more approachable resources. Just taking a look at the reference manuals provided by Intel is enough to make anyone lose hope. I seriously doubt any single human is capable of reading and understanding that in any reasonable amount of time.
If you wanna go down into the metal, consider picking up a microcontroller and writing your own firmware. You can ditch the OS and start squeezing every ounce of power from the hardware. It's pretty crazy how little power a well configured microcontroller can get by with.
I'd also suggest learning WebAssembly! The text format is quite pleasant, and it does away with many of the issues you'd have to deal with when using real hardware. Even better, the spec [0] is actually quite readable for regular developers. That might let people get their feet a bit wet without having having to go into the deep end of the pool right away.
The NAND to Tetris textbook is a masterpiece. (The book is called The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles. The authors are Nisan and Schocken).
I worked through the entire textbook by myself, doing all the projects, and having no previous knowledge of computer architecture or compilers. It was a challenging but smooth process. The difficulty level was just right and I didn't get frustrated.
The computer you build is designed brilliantly. It's as simple as it can be, while still being a real computer can be that can play video games.
Im studying CS right now (community college) and we have two low level courses. In the first one we use Nand2Tetris and also build a SAP-1 (simple as possible) computer following Ben Eaters YouTube series. One of the coolest classes I've ever taken. We all built an actual working computer on a fricken breadboard.
The second class is the one im taking right now on x86 assembly and its cool but definetly not as fun as building a computer from scratch.
If no ones has watched Ben Eaters videos I highly recommend them.
Comments
I really enjoyed learning x86 assembly in college, and I'd highly recommend others give it a try. If you focus on the core essentials (e.g. the reduced instruction set from the 8086), it's a small and fun toolkit.
Learning assembly and creating my own simulated processor using multiple layers of logic gates was one of the main cornerstones of my college education. I remember when things finally "clicked" and I finally understood how computers worked on a fundamental level, I was positively giddy for days.
Unfortunately, our technology has become increasingly complex. For a while I tried my hand at learning more about modern processors, but found it far too overwhelming. Maybe I just didn't know where to look for more approachable resources. Just taking a look at the reference manuals provided by Intel is enough to make anyone lose hope. I seriously doubt any single human is capable of reading and understanding that in any reasonable amount of time.
If you wanna go down into the metal, consider picking up a microcontroller and writing your own firmware. You can ditch the OS and start squeezing every ounce of power from the hardware. It's pretty crazy how little power a well configured microcontroller can get by with.
I'd also suggest learning WebAssembly! The text format is quite pleasant, and it does away with many of the issues you'd have to deal with when using real hardware. Even better, the spec [0] is actually quite readable for regular developers. That might let people get their feet a bit wet without having having to go into the deep end of the pool right away.
[0] https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/index.html
“From NAND to Tetris” is the classic starting point.
The NAND to Tetris textbook is a masterpiece. (The book is called The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles. The authors are Nisan and Schocken).
I worked through the entire textbook by myself, doing all the projects, and having no previous knowledge of computer architecture or compilers. It was a challenging but smooth process. The difficulty level was just right and I didn't get frustrated.
The computer you build is designed brilliantly. It's as simple as it can be, while still being a real computer can be that can play video games.
Im studying CS right now (community college) and we have two low level courses. In the first one we use Nand2Tetris and also build a SAP-1 (simple as possible) computer following Ben Eaters YouTube series. One of the coolest classes I've ever taken. We all built an actual working computer on a fricken breadboard.
The second class is the one im taking right now on x86 assembly and its cool but definetly not as fun as building a computer from scratch.
If no ones has watched Ben Eaters videos I highly recommend them.