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by DubiousPusher 1959 days ago
Coming from the pure CS side I definitely got this feeling. But the real value it provided me was to demystify a lot of what I was working on top of as a programmer. Not that I believe that working through this book has given me a complete understanding of the stack below where I work. I think a superscalar processor with a fat OS like Linux or Windows on top and several layers of drivers and firmware between is far far away from what this book teaches. But it did help me to stop thinking magically about a lot of what is going on. It's embarrassing to admit I once thought a lot of tools like debuggers and whatnot were doing some hocus pocus I couldn't hope to understand. This book really showed me that everything going on in a computer is capital D designed.

From your first projects in CS you're sitting atop a huge stack of tech. My own education was fairly low level compared to most CS programs. Several assembly languages, C, debugging crash dumps, register watches, etc were all part of my curriculum. Even still there is so much down below where I work it is hard not to think magically. Just being given a toy model of how all this doesn't but might work was extremely helpful. This may be why you might find CS majors more fond of this book than CE or EE.
1 comments
markus_zhang 1959 days ago
Just curious what curriculum gave a low level CS education? Did you deliberately choose courses such as Compiler thoery and Operating System? In my school(I'm in first semester but join as a returner as I got a Stat master yrs ago) they are both optional and we can skip many low level courses.
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DubiousPusher 1959 days ago
Honestly, it was my school. I went to Digipen Institute of Technology. There are a lot of teachers there who worked for Nintendo which has a very old school dev culture. For example, the Wii U was literally their first console with an actual operating system. There are also a lot of Microsoft folks there who worked in jobs like Xbox dev support which gives one a pretty intense education in tackling low level problems.

These days I work far far away from that level and much of knowledge has atrophied but I often appreciate still understanding the concepts.

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markus_zhang 1959 days ago
Thanks. This does sound very interesting. I wonder if there is any other place that offers a combination of many low level courses as well as game programming ones...Those Nintendo guys must be very cool. Did any of them work in the nes/snes period?
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DubiousPusher 1958 days ago
A couple. There was a range of experiences. The majority had been handheld developers building hardware and games for the GBC, GBA and DS.

I don't know specifically of another school that focuses on this. However, one thing I found over my college career and you are probably already aware of is that often, if you make a connection with department faculty and prove yourself ambitions they are accommodating in how they will account credits.

You might consider finding a school with a friendly and flexible faculty and then see if they will allow you to pursue a CS degree replacing some of the CS courses with CE courses. Give your existing degree you would might find a fair amount of latitude since they won't feel they need to babysit your trajectory.

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