November Update

Submitted by Andrew Wasson on Fri, 11/16/2012 - 3:15pm

Well, it's winter here now and I've been busy for the last few months so completing my 4-bit CPU has been put on the back-burner. This is primarily because I've been busy with work, summer holidays, extra curicullar work on some module extensions for a piece of software I use and recently I finished completing the terchnical edits on a book that's going to be published soon; it has nothing to do with TTL based computers but I'll blog about it when it's launched anyway.

The good news is that now we are getting into winter I'll be more apt to spend time at my workbench to complete the little CPU I started back in January but before I get too carried away with the project, I have one more distraction...

I just discovered the TECS (The Elements of Computing Systems) book and computer science course. It's been around for a few years but I just found it the other day and it is just what an amature computer scientist like me needs to keep my eyes on the ball.

I don't know why I hadn't stumbled across this book before, there's all sorts of online information and resources dedicated to it and the authors even have a website called Nand2Tetris to promote the book and supply the course to anyone who has the dedication to self-administer it. I ordered the book from Amazon and it just arrived this morning but I've already started the course and will set up a new section on the site to blog about my experiences as I go through the course.

If anyone is interested in following up on the course and book, here are a few links to get you going:

2 comments

by Bill Rowe on Sun, 08/17/2014 - 1:40pm

Andrew: Excellent find. How much progress have you made?

by Andrew Wasson on Sun, 08/17/2014 - 8:18pm

Hey Bill. Yeah, that book is pretty great. I put it down a little while back but I had created all of the Gates, registers, counters, ALU, RAM, etc... I needed and had completed the ASM part. I'm onto CHapter 5 now and I have a little time off so I think I'll dig back in and see if I can complete the course.  

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