Computer Science from the Bottom Up

Re:Computer Science from the Bottom Up by akersten on Thursday April 29, 2021 @03:38PM (#26985645)

Yeah, the first page of this book being "Everything is a File in Unix" is already so high-level and far above what I would call the "bottom-up" of computer science that this book should be renamed "Unix from the bottom-up."

The "bottom" of computer science would be mathematically explaining what it means to compute, and building up to the abstraction of a Turing machine, and eventually getting to a concrete implementation of what we call programming and code. This book has code on page 2 - but code is nowhere near the bottom.

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Re:Computer Science from the Bottom Up by mattwillmart on Thursday April 29, 2021 @10:38PM (#26989337)

Do you know a book like this? Sounds interesting to me as someone who is very interested in computing, but never went to university.

Specifically "mathematically explaining what it means to compute, and building up to the abstraction of a Turing machine"

Thanks

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Re:Computer Science from the Bottom Up by pugio on Thursday April 29, 2021 @11:14PM (#26989522)

Take a look at: Understanding Computation: From Simple Machines to Impossible Programs by Tom Stuart.

It's pretty much "computation theory for the everyday programmer". It uses Ruby to implement things like Turing Machines and the lambda calculus. Extremely accessible, and a lot of fun.

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Re:Computer Science from the Bottom Up by mattwillmart on Saturday May 01, 2021 @02:28AM (#27003806)

Thank you

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