[criddell]

For very foundational stuff, Charles Petzold has put out some great books.

His book Code is fantastic. He starts at simple battery and lightbulb circuits and builds and builds towards a simple CPU.

He also wrote The Annotated Turing which is a breakdown of Alan Turing seminal paper and you only need high school math to get through it.

When I was in school my favorite course was compiler design and we used Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (aka the dragon book). It’s one of the best textbooks I’ve used but that was 30 years ago. There might be something better now. Understanding parsers and lexers and (especially) state machines is something that will serve you well.

[arnaudvalette]

Thanks !

Ah, I'm interested in parsers these days (I just wrote one for parsing org data, I am a bit unsure about the architecture of the project but at least it does what I needed personally). I am right now at a friend's place that just showed my the dragon book from its shelves, that's a funny coincidence. I will check out Code.

[danielvaughn]

Code is an awesome book. Those first few chapters were nothing but lightbulb moments for me (pun intended).