An approachable, hands-on guide to understanding how computers work, from low-level circuits to high-level code.

How Computers Really Work is a hands-on guide to the computing everything from circuits to memory and clock signals, machine code, programming languages, operating systems, and the internet.

But you won't just read about these concepts, you'll test your knowledge with exercises, and practice what you learn with 41 optional hands-on projects. Build digital circuits, craft a guessing game, convert decimal numbers to binary, examine virtual memory usage, run your own web server, and more.

Explore concepts like how

The book's projects will have you translate your learning into action, as

And since a picture is worth a thousand bytes, chapters are filled with detailed diagrams and illustrations to help clarify technical complexities.

The projects require a variety of hardware - electronics projects need a breadboard, power supply, and various circuit components; software projects are performed on a Raspberry Pi. Appendix B contains a complete list. Even if you skip the projects, the book's major concepts are clearly presented in the main text.

(From Goodreads)