By Harry Chen, on November 19th, 2012
If you haven’t read the book yet and just glimpsed the title of this book, you will be definitely terrified by some keywords: code? hardware? software? programming language?! Please, don’t be threatened by these stubborn words and let your mind keep stepping onto a journey to the beauty of computer science.
As a computer science background, I read some of classical books from the Code’s author – Charles Petzold, who is a famous writer for Windows Programming (book list of Charles Petzold, http://www.charlespetzold.com/books.html). However, the content of this book is not similar with his other technical textbooks, the Code is a book about the story and history of computers, from some discoveries at very beginning of electronics, such as how to think of the combination of light bulb and switch that can be also treated as the fundamental logic of modern computers.
After reading Code, there has a question coming from my mind. What if the creative inventors who are not comfortable with the fundamental concepts behind what they have applied, for example, doing your Arduino sketch but without knowing what a chip looks like? (Check chapter 18 for detail). From my personal point of view, this will potentially hinder the creativity moving forward! Be cautious of that! How do you think? What is your experience on doing creative work without knowing much about ‘hidden’ story?
If you haven’t read the book yet and just glimpsed the title of this book, you will be definitely terrified by some keywords: code? hardware? software? programming language?! Please, don’t be threatened by these stubborn words and let your mind keep stepping onto a journey to the beauty of computer science.
As a computer science […]