On Wednesday 22 December 2010 17:07:46 David Liguori wrote: > I'm surprised no one has suggested this so far as I've read so I will, > but if one is really interested in learning about how the hardware works > the most obvious place to start is "assembly" or "machine" language. Well, it actually was suggested before: http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/fedora-users/msg387760.html There were also others that mentioned assembly afterwards, but I cannot bother now to dig out all those posts... :-) But as I said in that previous post, you don't want to *start* learning programming with assembly, but rather to *end* it with assembly. It gives you a hardware-level perspective on what happens inside a computer, and that is *not* a perspective any beginner should start with. If I understood correctly what OP wants, assembly is the ultimate answer to his wish to understand how programs actually run inside a computer. But in order to properly grasp the idea, he needs quite some experience in higher-level languages. It's a long road of abstraction from "point&click" GUI to a sequence of assembly instructions that are actually being executed. As the OP has no experience in higher levels of programming, it would be hard for him to have a reasonable overview of that whole road just by looking at assembly. I would rather prefer the top-down approach than the bottom-up approach in this case. So the OP should start with, say, python, than advance to C, and then he may take a look at assembly. The OO and functional languages can be dealt with afterwards if he wishes to know about them. > You don't actually write machine code but rather, "nenomics" that > correspond to it. It's spelled "mnemonics". Best, :-) Marko -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines