(Review) Code, by Charles Petzold

I don't remember where I got the suggestion to read this book; it must be something related to my quest to find books that talks about the foundations of technology, rather than about the latest and greatest tool. Anyway, somewhere I found a link to this nice little book, and I'm glad I did.

You can think about Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software as an Introduction to Electronic university course, given by a professor that actually cares about his students. Weird, I know.

The book is actually much more than that. Its trajectory goes through two thousands years of discovers, starting from the concept of numbers to Object Oriented Programming; explaining, in the process, binary numbers, relays, logic gates, transistors, integrated circuits, Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800, assembly language and operating systems. Everything is plain and simple English, with a surprising attention to details.

The book is so simple, and convincing, you'll actually consider (for a short while) building your own adding machine, or going back to Assembly to code your next toy project. It is seriously that good!

I see only a couple of shortcomings in this book: the first, is that it feels, and is, a book written in the twentieth century. So many things happened in the past twelve years which are not reflected in here. Second, it's mainly a hardware book; it talks, in the last few chapters, about programming languages and operating system, but it's only a very brief overview.

So now, after enjoying Charles Petzold's Code, the question is: is there an equally good book about the story of operating systems or programming languages? For any suggestion, please give me a shout on Twitter.