Contents
All 53 chapters of How Computers Work, in 9 parts. 1,102,131 words.
Every chapter
- 1The Whole Machine in One LookYou will be able to say what a computer actually is, with nothing magical left in it.36 min
- 2Electricity - The Thing That Does All The WorkYou will be able to say what electricity is, in terms of atoms and the particles inside them.55 min
- 3From Sand to Silicon - Rock, Furnace, Wafer, FabYou will be able to say where the silicon in a chip comes from, naming the rock and the furnace.53 min
- 4The Transistor - The Switch That Built The WorldYou will be able to say what a transistor is, in one sentence, without lying.56 min
- 5Logic Gates and Arithmetic - How Switches Learn to AddYou will be able to explain how a rule about true and false became a rule about electricity, and who made that jump and when.84 min
- 6How a Machine Remembers - Latches, Clocks and Memory CellsYou will explain why a plain logic gate cannot remember anything. You will draw an SR latch and say what all four input pairs do.62 min
- 7Numbers and Meaning - Binary, Text and UnicodeYou will be able to explain why computers count in twos, and convert any number to binary and back by two different methods.73 min
- 8Pixels, Screens and How You See an ImageYou will be able to say what light is, and why your eye sees a slice of it. You will be able to explain why three colours can fake millions.50 min
- 9Sound, Magnets, Speakers and Phone CallsYou will be able to say what sound physically is, with numbers. You will be able to draw a speaker and name every part in it.69 min
- 10Inside the CPUYou will be able to name every part inside a processor and say what it does.91 min
- 11The Memory Hierarchy - Cache, RAM and Virtual MemoryYou will be able to draw the whole memory ladder, from registers down to tape, with real sizes, real waiting times and real prices.70 min
- 12Storage - Disks, SSDs, Flash and FilesystemsYou will be able to say exactly what makes storage different from memory, and why every computer needs both.91 min
- 13Buses, Ports, Drivers and FirmwareYou will be able to point at any part of a motherboard and say what it does.80 min
- 14The Long Road - A History of Computing MachinesYou will be able to tell the story of computing from tally sticks to the machines of 2026, in order, with correct years and names.97 min
- 15The Birth of Software - Punch Cards to the First CompilerYou will be able to say exactly what a program is at the lowest level, and show a real one as raw numbers.69 min
- 16How a Compiler Actually WorksYou will be able to name every stage between the text you type and the electricity that runs, in the right order, and say what each one does.89 min
- 17Programming Languages and How to Think in ThemYou will be able to say what a programming language actually is, and why there are thousands of them instead of one.90 min
- 18Operating SystemsYou will be able to say exactly what an operating system is, and name the three jobs it exists to do.130 min
- 19The Terminal and the ShellYou will be able to say what a terminal actually was, as a physical machine, and why the word survived after the machine died.105 min
- 20Files, Formats, Extensions and the .exeYou will be able to say exactly what a file is, and why there is no such thing as a "picture file" at the level of the disk.100 min
- 21From Key Press to Pixel - The Complete TraceYou will be able to follow one key press, the letter A, from your fingertip to the light entering your eye, without a single gap in the story.102 min
- 22Graphics and the GPUYou will be able to explain why a graphics chip is built differently from a processor, and what "throughput" buys that "speed" does not.97 min
- 23Networking From Zero - Signals, Ethernet, MAC, ARP and DHCPYou will be able to say what a network actually is, and name the four jobs every network must do no matter how it is built.104 min
- 24IP Addresses, Private and Public, NAT and Carrier-Grade NATYou will be able to say exactly what an IP address labels, and why it is not a label for a device and not a label for a person.93 min
- 25DNS - From a Name to an AddressYou will be able to explain why the internet needs a naming system at all, and what people did in the years before it existed.87 min
- 26Packets and RoutingYou will be able to explain why data is chopped into small pieces at all, instead of being sent as one long stream, and name the four separate reasons.74 min
- 27Traceroute Decoded - Reading Your Own PathYou will be able to explain why there is no "show me the route" command in the internet protocol, and why traceroute is a trick rather than a feature.77 min
- 28TCP, Ports, and Why a Timeout Is EvidenceYou will be able to say exactly what the internet's basic delivery service promises, and the much longer list of things it does not promise.70 min
- 29Why Mobile Data Worked, and the Diagnostic MethodYou will be able to state the difference between "the site is down" and "I cannot reach the site", and say who is affected by each.91 min
- 30How the Internet Was BuiltYou will be able to tell the story of long-distance messaging from signal fires to fibre, in order, with correct names and years.74 min
- 31Wireless - WiFi, Bluetooth, Cellular and GPSYou will be able to explain what a radio wave is and why an antenna has the length it has, and work out the wavelength of any band in your head.79 min
- 32TLS, HTTPS and the Web StackYou will be able to write a complete HTTP request by hand, byte by byte, and read a real response header block without guessing at any line.78 min
- 33The OSI and TCP/IP Models, Retrofitted to Your Own SessionYou will be able to say why networks are built in layers at all, what each layer is allowed to know, and what it is forbidden to know.63 min
- 34Firewalls, VPNs, CDNs, IPv6 and the GapsYou will be able to say exactly what localhost, 127.0.0.1 and 0.0.0.0 each mean, and why 0.0.0.0 means two different things depending on where you write…117 min
- 35Web and App DevelopmentYou will be able to draw the line between frontend and backend, say exactly what runs on the user's device and what runs on a server you control, and…134 min
- 36APIs - What They Are and Where They Came FromYou will be able to say what an API actually is in one sentence, and to defend that sentence: it is a published agreement, not a technology.123 min
- 37Git - Why It Works With No NetworkYou will be able to say what version control is for, and name the six real problems it solves, rather than repeating that it "saves your work".83 min
- 38What a Commit Actually IsYou will be able to say what content-addressed storage is: the name of a thing is worked out from the thing itself, so equal content always gets equal…84 min
- 39The Index, Push, Fetch, Merge and RebaseYou will be able to name the three places a file can live in git, working directory, index and object database, and say which command moves content…86 min
- 40Your Own Git Server, and What GitHub AddsYou will be able to say, in one sentence, what a git server is, and prove it by building one in an empty folder in under a second.106 min
- 41CI/CD and What a "Run" Really IsYou will be able to explain what continuous integration is as a practice, and say clearly why it is not the same thing as a tool that runs tests.113 min
- 42SSH, HTTPS, Keys, Tokens and ScopesYou will be able to explain the two ways git talks to a server, SSH and HTTPS, and say exactly what is different and what is identical.101 min
- 43Cloud Computing, the Bezos Mandate, AWS and AzureYou will be able to say what "the cloud" actually is in one plain sentence, without any mystery, and say exactly what it changed and what it did not.131 min
- 44SecurityYou will be able to say what security actually means, using the five properties professionals name, and build a threat model in plain words.112 min
- 45Games - How They Are Made and How They RunYou will be able to say exactly what makes a game different from every other program on your machine, in one sentence, and defend it.119 min
- 46Machine Learning From Scratch - Fitting, Loss, Gradients and Neural NetworksYou will be able to say exactly what machine learning is, in one sentence, without using the word "intelligence", and explain how it differs from…119 min
- 47Parameters, Tokens and EmbeddingsYou will be able to say exactly what one parameter is: a single number in a single position of a single table inside the model.105 min
- 48The TransformerYou will be able to say what came before the transformer, why it worked, and the exact reason the field abandoned it in about eighteen months.142 min
- 49How a Model Is Actually Made - Pretraining to ReleaseYou will be able to name every stage that turns raw web text into a shipped chat model, in order, and say what each stage costs and what it changes.109 min
- 50Benchmarks, Evaluation, Versions and DatesYou will be able to say exactly what a benchmark is, in five mechanical parts, and name which part is being argued about when two numbers disagree.93 min
- 51Serving, Running One Yourself, RAG, Agents and the LimitsYou will be able to say what changes when a model stops learning and starts answering, and give the memory numbers for both.83 min