Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken?

Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by dmytrish on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @11:50AM (#16745842)

The second part is awesome too.

The first part shows how to design an unoptimized and simplistic, but complete and working 16-bit CPU and RAM from logic gates.

The second part builds a whole software stack on top of it using a virtual stack-based VM:

    - CPU assembler;
    - a (AOT) compiler from the VM opcodes 
      into the CPU assembly;
    - a compiler from the high-level language 
      called Jack (an educational mix of Java/C 
      with many complex parts removed) into the 
      VM opcodes;
    - a standard library for the Jack language 
      (Screen/Keyboard/Output/Math/String/Array/
      Sys/Memory classes), including writing your own
      memory allocator and drawing lines/circles 
      and bitmapping glyphs into video memory 
      for text rendering;
    - your own project (usually a simple game and 
      sometimes marvels like [0]) written in Jack 
      on top of all of that;

The courses are definitely very challenging and some previous exposure to the topics is desired.

[0] https://github.com/QuesterZen/hackenstein3D

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by SilasX on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @02:54PM (#16747908)

Wow, someone made an FPS in Jack on the Hack computer? Crazy!

(Just completed parts 1 and 2 last week on Coursera btw, really opened my eyes!)

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Re:Ask HN: What are the best MOOCs you've taken? by ajudson on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @05:41PM (#16749591)

I'm sure part 2 is great as well, I've only had time to do the first part so only wanted to speak to that. The way it jumps up and down the hardware stack is a very good tool from a pedagogy standpoint - doing assembly language before the CPU really informs why we want the CPU to be set up in the way it is.

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