[diarrhea]

That was my observation as well (didn't read the 1st ed.). The middle third of the book is very dense and a lot of concepts will have to be kept in mind as the CPU is built up from plain transistors. It was all new to me, so challenging.

In the last third however, higher level concepts, languages etc. are introduced, and there's nothing new or even very interesting in that part for anyone with a year or more of regular coding experience.