For a more accessible yet also very comprehensive book, see Petzold's Code: http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/

Whenever someone asks me how a computer works, this is what I tell them to read. No need to qualify the recommendation on their background, the book is accessible to anyone because it starts from first principles and builds layers on top.

Seconded. And a quick note that this course is based on the book "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles (The MIT Press)"

A recommendation for the book. It was excellent.

Purchased - thanks :)

This is an incredible course to learn about low level stuff like computer architecture, micro OP codes, machine language, assembly code, virtual machine...

I implemented the course[1] in Logism[2] but unfortunately the simulation is too slow to run Teris!

[1] https://github.com/trungdq88/16-bit-computer

[2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/circuit/

Course materials (projects) seem to contain only slides, with bullet points, not real explanations. Am I missing something? Should I buy the book to actually have the course?

You are probably looking for the videos on coursera [1].

[1] https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer

Thanks. Even though I am not the op

Got it, thanks! The whole rectangular felt like a single object, and I always clicked in the center, so missed the other parts.

You don’t really need the book for the first half of the course, but I found it very helpful for the second half. More so than the vids, which got boring due to repetition.

Seconded a second time. Very hard, and very worthwhile.