Nand2Tetris

I’m currently part way through a fantastic course on hardware design. It’s called Nand2Tetris and walks through building a simulated computer from the very simplest components (individual transistors) right through to a fully functioning computer. There’s a subreddit available if you want to chat with some fellow learners and a TED talk covering the course and some of the educational ideas behind it.

Everything runs in a simulator so there’s no actual hardware to buy or break or futz about with (which you may or may not find attractive) and this means you can focus on the underlying theory and understand what’s going on rather than getting bogged down in implementation details.

Still early days (I’m busy building some of the more complex components from basic logic gates at the moment) but it’s very good so far. No previous experience is required, but if you have none, be prepared to do some fairly serious thinking and maybe a bit of background reading along the way.

Update:
All done now. I really liked this course. It had great pacing and a really good overall shape that kept my interest all the way through. There was plenty of detail without any tedious busy-work and it covered an awful lot of ground without feeling overwhelming at any point. While this little short course in no way represents the realities and complexities of a real world project it did provide a great insight into what kinds of issues are involved in computer design. The projects all required some thought but built on previous knowledge very well and there was a definite sense of accomplishing something really quite significant for the relatively small amount of effort involved. 10/10 would recommend.