Computer Organization and Design MIPS Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface

"This is a textbook that covers how computers work from the ground up. It includes hardware, software, and operating systems. It’s a really thick book, but also a really good one! What I’ve found during my move to data science is that the more I work in this field, the more I need to understand how to optimize my code, how the instructions move through the various big data systems that I mentioned earlier, and how all of this can impact performance. It’s really important for me, for example, to understand how data moves through a network and can be slowed down by bandwidth limitations. “This is the book I’d recommend reading if you missed out on a formal computer science education” This is the book I’d recommend reading if you missed out on a formal computer science education. Some data scientists tend to forget about these aspects because the structures they use, such as R data tables or Python data frames, are abstracting away what’s going on under the hood. You don’t need to know everything from end to end, but having a general idea of why things can be under-optimized will be very helpful. Something that’s really motivated me in my learning was to have concrete projects to work on. The first time I really witnessed the power of computer programming was when I was doing some data cleaning at work, and made the effort of automating this cleaning; by the end I was blown away by how fast the process had become. This idea of making the computer work for me was very powerful. It’s only later that you start having an interest for understanding the inner workings of computer hardware, once you stumble upon a few problems in your programming. So yes, it does make sense to read this book a bit later on, once you’ve mastered the basics of whatever language you are interested in. It’s easy to get overwhelmed when you go down this path. People always say to start with projects, but it can be hard at the beginning to even think of what to do. Finding a mentor on specialized websites or at data science meetups can be a great way of solving this issue, by having an experienced person telling you where to start. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . For people who are already working at a job that revolves around data, I’d recommend focusing on your personal ‘pain points’ and trying to solve them with programming; for me, this was automating things I was doing with Excel spreadsheets. There’s a very good book dedicated to these kinds of very actionable tasks, called Automate the Boring Stuff with Python ; this would be another great book to read for those moving from typical office applications to programming."