Lots of technical detail is available online but it's not organized or collected into a convenient place. In The Secret Life of Programs, veteran engineer Jonathan E. Steinhart explores--in depth--the foundational concepts that underlie the machine. Subjects like computer hardware, how software behaves on hardware, as well as how people have solved problems using technology over time.
You'll learn:
• How the real world is converted into a form that computers understand, like bits, logic, numbers, text, and colors
• The fundamental building blocks that make up a computer including logic gates, adders, decoders, registers, and memory
• Why designing programs to match computer hardware, especially memory, improves performance
• How programs are converted into machine language that computers understand
• How software building blocks are combined to create programs like web browsers
• Clever tricks for making programs more efficient, like loop invariance, strength reduction, and recursive subdivision
• The fundamentals of computer security and machine intelligence
• Project design, documentation, scheduling, portability, maintenance, and other practical programming realities.
