While these are great projects, they're for very different audiences. Code is a really well written pop-science book that goes into logic circuits. The Nand2Tetris book comments for example that:
> The HDL that we will use is documented in appendix 2 and can be learned in about one hour
which about as meaningful as saying you can learn X's syntax in an hour. Nand2tetris is a serious investment of time and if you've never done something like FPGA design (VHDL etc) or assembly, it takes a bit of getting your head around.
> While these are great projects, they're for very different audiences.
That was my point in posting The Elements of Computing Systems since it seems that the author of this post might be more interested in hands-on side of building a CPU and the software stack on top of that.
I think the authors are actually right in that the syntax of their HDL can be learned in an hour. It's more that learning how to use that syntax to build a CPU takes a good amount of time.
Thanks for the mention of Shenzhen IO. I'll check it out.
> The HDL that we will use is documented in appendix 2 and can be learned in about one hour
which about as meaningful as saying you can learn X's syntax in an hour. Nand2tetris is a serious investment of time and if you've never done something like FPGA design (VHDL etc) or assembly, it takes a bit of getting your head around.
It's also worth mentioning Shenzhen IO as an interesting take on this (edutainment for programmers) https://www.zachtronics.com/shenzhen-io/