My SO decided to go to a web dev bootcamp a few years back. Before they went, I taught them 6502 asm so that they'd have some idea of how a computer works under the hood. It seems to have helped, and they were clearly the top of their class.

Albeit it's hard to separate the effects of that from simply living with someone who can talk with you at the end of each day of class.

If I were to go through it again, I'd do it with an MSP430 instead. The 6502's lack of registers that are the same width as the address bus (and therefore the multiple steps of indirection required for full pointers) obfuscated some of the concepts I was trying to convey.

The best class I ever took was a computer architecture course where we built up an 8-bit minicomputer from individual gates onward in a logic simulator. It was based on the Tanenbaum Structured Computer Organization and the Patt and Patel "Introduction to Computing Systems* books. By the end we were programming it in a limited dialect of assembly and also with a minimal version of C that compiled down to that assembly dialect. Very cool, and I've never been mystified by pointers since then.

I almost think a better post would be "Learn Computer Architecture and the rest will come". For that, I can't recommend http://nand2tetris.org/ enough.