4 ms·
No (see the earlier discussion for this book's prereqs)
by 48864w6ui 3y ago
No (see the earlier discussion for this book's prereqs)
- tcbawo 3y agoThere have been many posts and much discussion on this book since Wirth’s passing. Looking around, I found some discussion that describes this book more as a description of a complete system than an introduction that describes how it gets there. I don’t think this necessarily disqualifies it as a beginner’s book. Having a reference description of a complete system that one can fit in one’s head might be a great resource for a beginning programmer. If anyone has read/used this book before, I would love to hear their opinion about where it best fits in their journey.
- cxr 3y agoThis is a hardcore CS book. It's not for beginners. It's not even really a good fit for an American-style CS undergrad course on operating systems. That's before getting into all the errata for the places where what was written in the book diverges from the actual system implementation.
- tcbawo 3y agoThank you for elaborating on my question. I haven’t read the book, so I have no idea where it fits into a general curriculum. Having grown up in the 8-bit home computing era where a user could wrap their head around the entire computer and OS, the idea of building a broad base of fundamentals sounds attractive. Would you put this at the same level of difficulty as SICP, which another commenter suggested?
- cxr 3y agoI haven't read SICP in its entirety, but that sounds wrong. SICP is explicitly for an intro to programming course, and it's written in a way that's approachable for first-time programmers from what I remember.