Code, by Charles Petzold. It came to me at exactly the right time, and broke through the biggest conceptual barrier I’d had until that point; how do you actually go from logic gates to general purpose computing? Having Petzold walk you up the ladder of abstraction, never missing a link, really got me over the hump of treating all that complexity as a black box. On a meta level it gave me confidence to go approach apparently impossible things with an open mind and dig deep enough that you see how the “magic” works.
I'm not sure, but I think that when I looked into it, I found out that Code started from a level or two lower, but doesn't go up as many layers of abstraction as TEOCS.
This is the same answer for me. I picked it up because as a teenager I thought it was about encryption (didn't know the word at that time). It also had the effect of introducing me to the right section of books in the library.
That one is good too, though it can get a little obscure in some sections.. I tried reading it twice! The first time I was stuck on the memory chapter. The second time I was stalled by the clock and synchronization thing, but it's still a great book. I hope I can muster the courage to read his Annotated Turing Paper.
This was going to be my suggestion. I was disparately taught all this stuff in uni, but this book joined all the dots for me. It's really well written and perfectl paced. Seconded!
