I completed the The Elements of Computing Systems course, a.k.a. Nand2Tetris just now, and I wanted to share what I learned from it while my memories

What I learned from Nand2Tetris

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2021-06-06 14:30:06

I completed the The Elements of Computing Systems course, a.k.a. Nand2Tetris just now, and I wanted to share what I learned from it while my memories are still warm.

I started it roughly a month ago, out of curiosity. It looked like an expansive course touching so many topics I wanted to research, but found tiresome to do. The description said it didn’t go into the gory details, which was a great relief for me. It was also mostly self-contained, and that was appealing too, because I’m mostly a novice programmer.

I gotta admit, I was into programming since I was a middle-schooler, but I never got the chance to really dive into it. It was nothing but laziness, since I always found programming intriguing. Although I haven’t been programming at all, I’m an avid Hacker News reader.

Let’s talk about the course, not me. It starts with the logic gates and walks you through building a complete computing system, hardware and software. While you need to build all the components, it’s recommended to follow the design given in the course materials. Designing the system by yourself would be out of the scope of the course, and in many cases, reinventing the wheel.