Nand to Tetris

I started going through one of the online courses this week called From Nand to Tetris. It’s turning out to be a great way to learn how to compose rudimentary gates into a functional system. So far I’ve only gotten through the first week, but the basic building blocks are interesting. I’m really interested in the topics that will be covered later on dealing with building an ALU, and even later on an assembler. You can check out the course on coursera or check the full project at the dedicated website nand2tetris.

So far in the course I’ve learned how to create binary expressions from a truth table, simplifying them, and then turn those expressions into logic gates. I was able to compose 4WayMux16 and Dmuxers along with a FullAdder, and Adder16 chip. The next part of the process has me building an ALU, which I’m pretty excited about and will tackle tomorrow night. Overall I highly recommend the course, even if you don’t want to be a computer scientist it’s a great way to learn about how your computer operates at an incredibly low level.