If you haven’t seen Ben Eater’s YouTube videos, they are top-notch. Even if you “know” the subject material (I thought I did...) they are very well done and worth watching.
Definitely. I made the real thing in hardware. As a complete beginner to electronics it took me quite a long time but it was so worth it. I've always hated having to accept the existence of "magic" in my machines. For me this was the final layer that allowed me to finally understand how electronic computers actually work. Things like building flip flops from scratch were so insightful. And if that's not enough he's got videos on how transistors work at the atomic level. It's like the whole of computer science finally fell into place.
100% ditto minus the building it myself. Through ben's videos I finally understood how instructions really work and how a program is executed. Despite being a tech fanatic, I'm have so much more appreciation now for what is actually happening.