The Secret Life of Programs: Understand Computers -- Craft Better Code

What 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.

Table of contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Internal Language of Computers

Chapter 2: Combinatorial Logic

Chapter 3: Sequential Logic

Chapter 4: Computer Anatomy

Chapter 5: Computer Architecture

Chapter 6: Communications Breakdown

Chapter 7: Organizing Data

Chapter 8: Language Processing

Chapter 9: The Web Browser

Chapter 10: Application and System Programming

Chapter 11: Shortcuts and Approximations

Chapter 12: Deadlocks and Race Conditions

Chapter 13: Security

Chapter 14: Machine Intelligence

Chapter 15: Real-World Considerations

Author: Jonathan E. Steinhart

August 2019, 504 pp.

ISBN-13: 9781593279707