

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

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?<p>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?<p>Is there an equivalent of The Art of Computer Programming in the hardware world?
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s_kanev
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.

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

