What a great title for a book uh? Code is a book that I recently finished that tells you how computers really work. Charles Petzold explains in great detail, technologies that have been buried underneath layers of abstraction for decades. The book starts you off with early logical systems like Braille and Morse code and the builds from there to simple switches and logical gates. Petzold then does a superb job of relating these technologies to microprocessors, memory, and machine code. In addition to the knowledge, Petzold does an excellent job of entertaining you with the history and evolution of the computer. The examples he uses are simple but effective. I can honestly say this was a fun book to read (except for some of the math). Many times while I was reading it I would think why had I not heard of this book years ago.

So I recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand how computers work. For developers I know with today's modern language you aren't going to be writing machine code. But I strongly feel having a good understanding of computer architecture will allow you to take better advantage of the higher level languages you use on a daily basis. Don't you think?