How Computers Work
Starting from a single electrical signal, this book dismantles the complete chain from transistors, CPUs, memory, and operating systems to modern multi-core architectures. No formulas to memorize — only intuition to build. Suitable for complete beginners through advanced engineers. 28 chapters to master computer fundamentals.
28
Chapters
Free
Forever
Table of Contents
Ch01
What Can a Single Switch Do
From light switches to transistors — the birth of logic gates
Ch02
Why Only 0 and 1
Binary isn't invented — it's naturally selected
Ch03
How an Adder Is Built
Building a calculating circuit from logic gates
Ch04
From Circuit to Chip
How billions of transistors fit on a fingernail
Ch05
Instructions Are the CPU's Language
What MOV, ADD and JMP really mean
Ch06
The Life of an Instruction
Fetch → Decode → Execute → Write-back, step by step
Ch07
Pipelining: The Factory Mindset of a CPU
Why 4GHz doesn't mean 4 billion operations per second
Ch08
Registers: The CPU's Pockets
The closer data is to the CPU, the faster — but how close?
Ch09
The Secret of Function Calls
What is the stack, and why does recursion overflow it
Ch10
Memory Is a Long Street
The real meaning of addresses, bytes and pointers
Ch11
Cache: The CPU's Cheat Sheet
Why L1/L2/L3 cache can speed things up 100x
Ch12
Virtual Memory: The Illusion of Memory
Why every program thinks it owns all the memory
Ch13
HDD vs SSD: What's the Real Difference
Sequential vs random access — how physical structure defines speed
Ch14
The Storage Pyramid
The eternal triangle: speed vs capacity vs cost
Ch15
The OS Is the Ultimate Manager
Kernel mode vs user mode — where is the boundary
Ch16
Processes: Programs Come Alive
From ELF binary to a running process
Ch17
Threads and Concurrency
Concurrency is not parallelism — how one CPU multitasks
Ch18
Scheduling: Who Runs First
The CFS algorithm — the OS's fair arbiter
Ch19
Locks, Deadlocks and Race Conditions
Why multi-threaded programming is so hard
Ch20
File Systems: City Planning for Data
Where deleted files go, and what an inode is
Ch21
Out-of-Order Execution: The CPU Is Smarter Than You
The CPU reorders your instructions — yet gets the right answer
Ch22
Branch Prediction: Betting to Save Time
Why if-else is sometimes faster than you think
Ch23
Cache-Friendly Code
Same algorithm, 10x speed difference from memory access patterns
Ch24
The Cost of Multi-Core
Why adding CPUs doesn't always help — NUMA and False Sharing
Ch25
Where Is the I/O Bottleneck
Sync/async/epoll — from blocking I/O to io_uring
Ch26
GPU: Why It's Perfect for AI
SIMD, massive parallelism and what CUDA really is
Ch27
Virtualization and Containers
What really separates a Hypervisor from Docker
Ch28
What Comes Next for Computers
RISC-V, compute-in-memory, and what quantum computing actually solves