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Shimon Schocken
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The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles Paperback – 25 January 2008

by Noam Nisan (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 393 ratings
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The Elements of Computing Systems, second edition: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
The Elements of Computing Systems, second edition: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
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A textbook with a hands-on approach that leads students through the gradual construction of a complete and working computer system including the hardware platform and the software hierarchy.In the early days of computer science, the interactions of hardware, software, compilers, and operating system were simple enough to allow students to see an overall picture of how computers worked. With the increasing complexity of computer technology and the resulting specialization of knowledge, such clarity is often lost. Unlike other texts that cover only one aspect of the field, The Elements of Computing Systems gives students an integrated and rigorous picture of applied computer science, as its comes to play in the construction of a simple yet powerful computer system.Indeed, the best way to understand how computers work is to build one from scratch, and this textbook leads students through twelve chapters and projects that gradually build a basic hardware platform and a modern software hierarchy from the ground up. In the process, the students gain hands-on knowledge of hardware architecture, operating systems, programming languages, compilers, data structures, algorithms, and software engineering. Using this constructive approach, the book exposes a significant body of computer science knowledge and demonstrates how theoretical and applied techniques taught in other courses fit into the overall picture.Designed to support one- or two-semester courses, the book is based on an abstraction-implementation paradigm; each chapter presents a key hardware or software abstraction, a proposed implementation that makes it concrete, and an actual project. The emerging computer system can be built by following the chapters, although this is only one option, since the projects are self-contained and can be done or skipped in any order. All the computer science knowledge necessary for completing the projects is embedded in the book, the only pre-requisite being a programming experience.The book's web site provides all tools and materials necessary to build all the hardware and software systems described in the text, including two hundred test programs for the twelve projects. The projects and systems can be modified to meet various teaching needs, and all the supplied software is open-source.
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  1. ISBN-10
    0262640686
  2. ISBN-13
    978-0262640688
  3. Publisher
    MIT Press Academic
  4. Publication date
    25 January 2008
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    20.32 x 1.75 x 22.86 cm
  7. Print length
    342 pages
  8. See all details
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Product description

Review

A refreshingly new way of looking at computer systems as a whole by considering all aspects of a complete system in an integrated manner.

―Jonathan Bowen, Times Higher Education Supplement

About the Author

Noam Nisan is Dean of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Shimon Schocken is Professor of Computer Science, and Founding Dean, Efi Arazi School of Computer Science, IDC Herzliya, Israel.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ MIT Press Academic (25 January 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 342 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0262640686
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0262640688
  • Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 20.32 x 1.75 x 22.86 cm
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 393 ratings

About the authors

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  1. Noam Nisan

    Noam Nisan

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    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Noam Nisan is Professor at the Institute of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

    See more on the author's page
  2. Shimon Schocken

    Shimon Schocken

    Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
    Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

    Shimon Schocken is professor and founding dean of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at IDC Herzliya, a young Israeli university he helped found in 1995. He was also a tenured professor at NYU (1985-1995) and a visiting professor at Harvard (2005) and Stanford (2012). Shimon enjoys developing innovative courses and open source software to promote free web-based science education. Shimon's other passion is mountain biking, a subject about which he wrote a book in Hebrew, published by Kinerent-Zmora-Modan. website: www.shimonschocken.com

    See more on the author's page
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Top reviews from Australia

Donald Whitlock
2.0 out of 5 stars Another disappointment due to lack of Proper description
Reviewed in Australia on 26 July 2020
Verified Purchase
Was not what expected or what was described
Another waste of money and this one turned up I was really looking forward to reading But it was the upteen revised edition and had hardly any diagrams again mislead by little to no proper description from the seller remember a picture is worth a thousand words
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Anonymous Disgruntled Student
2.0 out of 5 stars Underwhelming as a Textbook
Reviewed in Australia on 1 May 2023
This textbook was the basis of one of my University classes, and I was very underwhelmed.
The thesis statement that 'engineers work with abstractions' was neat and the textbook does well to support that conclusion; but the material itself was very poor in my opinion.

If this is your introduction to the hardware aspect of a conceptual processor without the intent of delving deeper this might be serviceable. It is better than some other textbooks I flipped through as it doesn't get hung up on x86 weirdness for chapters on end which doesn't really support you in learning the theoretical end of computer science. It also isn't solely a programming perspective on these topics as some other resources are - and for universities and individuals without Verilog subscriptions or equivalent, comes with 'an alternative'.

For the most part I feel like this book shoots itself in the foot, in the attempt to simplify some areas, it adds strange idiosyncrasies to other areas as a result. It isn't unique in that sense as many other resources can fall into that trap, but ultimately in a university setting, the entire examinations and evaluations are then more focused on you knowing these idiosyncratic properties of the nand2tetris project rather than actual Computer Science knowledge. Sidebar: The Von Neumann chapter was particularly interesting as I feel like it glosses over the fact that the nand2tetris project is not entirely Von Neumann as they describe, and rather has the defining feature of Harvard architecture. I think I understand why they've done this, but it's also symptomatic of this issue. This is compounded by the extremely cursory nature of the entire resource: I felt like it didn't go to an adequate level of detail, and it was a pretty poor springboard to then apply to real architectures. Admittedly having written assembly, designed a single-cycle processor and having dabbled with writing a JIT compiler all prior to the course, that is just my impression and is not from experience. Their tools are just underbaked. It might be things as simple as their GUI not resizing, menu options being cut-off, terrible default settings; things I know take virtually no effort to fix, as I've done so manually myself. It feels like a lack of care - which is strange because there is clearly a lot of passion also in their rigor to make this as accessible as possible, even if perhaps to a fault. Putting the UX design aside, it was serviceable, but still very underdeveloped and honestly got more in the way of practicing these concepts in my opinion than practicing with existing or real architectures in most cases. Lastly the prose and formatting, especially in the hardware chapters, was just horrible to read through in parts. It felt at times as if it were a transcribed lecture and thought it just didn't scan well on paper.
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Top reviews from other countries

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José
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente Livro!
Reviewed in Brazil on 5 June 2022
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Excelente livro, mostra passo a passo como construir um computador do "zero" em todos os níveis e ainda tem material já desenvolvido no site deles.
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Ryan O.
5.0 out of 5 stars Thrilling although kind of falls apart at the end, but still well worth the experience
Reviewed in the United States on 24 April 2022
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This book is an unparalleled companion in explaining, piece-by-piece, how you can build a somewhat realistic computer from the ground up in a way that is tremendously satisfying. However, it does kind of fall apart at the end, and it's difficult to finish without outside resources. Still, as a concise guide, it is unparalleled, and I am extremely happy I went on this journey, even if it kind of runs out of steam at the end.

This book is simply a guide to the project on the website of the same name. Completing the project is the primary intellectual profit of this book.

In chapters 1-5 you build up the hardware of the computer, from logic gates to CPU and RAM. These chapters are a breeze and take maybe 5 hours max. Easy and enjoyable.

In chapters 6-11, you build up the compiler to translate from a high level language (Jack) to machine code. The difficulty rapidly ramps up at this point. The assembler (chapter 6) probably took me 3 hours, but wasn't difficult. Chapters 7 and 8 (the virtual machine translator) are where it gets really hard. Each chapter took me 10 hours, since you're translating from VM code to assembly. Programming in assembly is a pain in the ass no matter how easy you make the assembly language. In chapter 9-10, you build the lexer and parser of the front-end of the compiler. At this point, the book gets even harder. It gives you almost no theory on how to actually build it. I needed to refer to a compiler book to help me along. I would say chapter 10 took me 20 hours alone.

Finally, chapter 11 (where I stopped), it gets nasty. You're writing a syntax-directed translator compiler.
You now write the code generator from jack to VM, and there's a lot of OS functions that it keeps calling whose functionality hasn't even been explained yet. After writing a skeleton translator (in about 10 hours), I figured I'd gotten most of what I can out of the book and stopped.

In chapter 12, you write a whole bunch of OS library functions in jack. There's very little guidance.

Overall, even though things fell apart for me at the end, I still learned so much, and I don't know where else I could have gotten this experience. It was fun (and frustrating), but I feel like I understand computers so much better now.

Highly recommend. I would estimate it takes 10 hours to read the book and 50+ hours to do the project (to the point that I did it, chapter 11).
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Leon
4.0 out of 5 stars Good book
Reviewed in Sweden on 27 February 2022
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Good book but recommend getting the newer version now in 2022.
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Guy from Toronto
5.0 out of 5 stars This is great winter-time geek fun!
Reviewed in Canada on 18 March 2018
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While the price of this book may be prohibitive to some, the authors have posted the first half, along with related coursework, for free online. It's a fantastic journey through the design and implementation of a simple yet functional computer. While the authors provide the skeletal architecture, you must be very resourceful to work through each chapter and project; you get to act as designer and engineer as you build the most rudimentary of circuits, then glue them together with abstract logic to produce high and higher levels of functionality into a variety of chips. Once you build the hardware (virtually) you continue to build the tools to program and use the computer, such as an assembler a compiler and an operating system.
One person found this helpful
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Yugesh Patnaik
5.0 out of 5 stars Addicting in a nutshell
Reviewed in India on 26 October 2018
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I am a hobbyist programmer and this book answered a lot of my questions about why code works the way it does.

The explanation is lucid, the software suite is updated and easy to use. It's a truly rewarding experience.
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