[kolbe]

I had sort of the opposite experience. The book was really fun, but it felt a lot more like I learned how to play some abstracted low-level game. It just didn't do much to actually inform me about how a modern CPU actually works.

[DubiousPusher]

I think that is nearly exactly the purpose of this book though. It is not to teach you how modern computers work. That may even be an impossible task (as in I'm not sure any one person could hold all of that in their head at once). But by giving you a version of a computer you can completely understand, you can begin to relate to how various pieces of the technology you work with on a daily basis might work.

For example, the portions on virtual machines do not explicitly show you how the JVM works but they give you an idea for the conerns involved such as managing object lifetimes and whatnot.