[kragen]

I don't disagree with him on that, but there's really quite a bit of stuff in there about quasi-circuitry-like things: "machines" and "latches" and things like

> In the next chapter, we'll investigate how to make machines that change over time, which will be the basis for us to store information. From there it's just a short hop to actual computers!

so I think that grounding abstract computation in something that can clearly be constructed in real life is actually very much a concern of the book, even if he's not planning to cover IEEE-754 denormals, the cost of TLB flushes, or strategies for reducing the bit error rate due to metastability when crossing clock domains.