It worked well for my goal of satisfying the prereqs of Knuth that the reader is expected to have written a few programs already, which I presume means writing in an assembly language. Another book that could be used instead is 'Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware Software Interface (RISC-V Edition)' and MIT has lectures for it on youtube https://6004.mit.edu/web/spring19/resources/lectures should anybody else want to learn.