Question

I’m looking for a laymen’s introduction to computer hardware and organization. Here are some of the topics I would like to cover.

1. Brief intro to electronics.

2. Gates and state machines, intro to register transfer and timing.

3. Basic CPU design. Control.

4. Microprogrammed CPU design.

5. Cache systems.

6. Memory hierarchy:registers, cache, RAM

7. Virtual memory organization.

8. Disk storage systems.

9. Internal busses-front side, memory, PCI

10. Internal busses for storage-IDE, SATA, SCSI

11. External busses-USB and firewire

12. Display systems and GPUs

I would prefer free resources online, but if nothing is available a book is fine as well. I have no background with hardware so an introductory text would be wonderful. Also I’m sorry if this isn’t directly programming but I don’t know where else to ask.

Answer 1

As mentioned already Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software is a great book that covers the fundamentals.

Here are a couple of other books:

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach

The Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture

Upgrading and Repairing PCs

Here’s a good site:

PC Architecture