My opinion on this book is really divided : on the one hand I enjoy some chapters, on the other hand I hardly managed to restrain myself from flipping through other chapters. If you are a Developer/Programmer you're not going to go into work having had an epiphany of how better to do things, but you may have a new found respect for what you're doing and the many, many ingenious shoulders you are standing upon.
Having pretty much built the systems (or simplified versions of) we're discussing in the incremental circuit and systems diagrams on the way.Īdmittedly there's some rather 'of their time' phrases and facts that raise a smile (low resolutions, high costs for 'small' HD storage sizes, usage of cassette tapes by consumers) but this is all still valid information when taken in the context of the time of writing. Starting with a basis in Morse Code and Braille through the telegraph system, barcodes, boolean logic, circuits with memory, von neumann machines, adding peripherals, I/O devices and GUI interfaces we just about catch up to the modern era with talk of HTTP and the world wide web. Petzold opens up the world of computing through a concise linear storytelling format. For me, whether it was due to age, experience or just maturity through both I found it filled gaps in my memory and indeed gaps in student course material. Yes if you've done some schooling in computing or computer science you may be happy with much of the content but you'll surely find things you've either not thought about before in much depth or just wasn't explained in quite the elegant way that Petzold does. I defy any developer/programmer/system builder to read this book and not blitz through it lapping it up. Being at least some 11 years old that's a lot of time in the tech world.
I was a little hesitant due to the year of release. I only read this book because it was quoted as a must read by Joel Spolsky on a stackexchange answer about how to go about learning programming (and finding out if you want/should be a programmer).
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