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Comment by zerr | Hacker News Reader

This is in my [long] list of books to read... Could you please clarify if it would be useful for experienced people as well? (i.e. who have a good understanding of how computers work from software perspective - had written in asm, etc...)

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What makes the book worth recommending is not so much the subject matter, but the quality of Petzold's explanations. We're all interested in computing and many of us have seen NAND gates before...Petzold tells one story where Boolean logic goes on a journey and becomes NAND gates. Sure there may be a few new facts we meet along the way, yet what makes Code a great book is the quality of its writing.

It's worth reading as a writer. For someone interested in computers, it is recreational as well.

I had been a professional programmer for 10+ years when I read it and it was full of those moments of clarity where disparate things I 'knew' came together and made much more sense.

Nice. And do you think it will be good as a first book as well?

Depends on the nature of the reader, but for some people I have hired who were gifted coders (right out of the gate knew how to approach problems) I would often give it to them on their first day and they ate it right up.

CODE is my favorite non-fiction book, but I actually don't think "useful" is the right word. I do think that no matter how experienced you are, it is an enlightening and joyful read. It is less about what the book covers than the approach it takes.

The book is really about building a CPU from transistors. If you already know how memory and an ALU work, you probably don't need to read this book. It is incredibly well-written though, and you might just enjoy it nontheless ;)

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