I loved this course and would strongly recommend it to anyone who works with computers that hasn't taken low-level CS classes.
This course does an exceptional job of giving you an intuitive understanding of some critical parts of how a computer works that affect higher-level programs and programming languages (for me the biggest aha! was grokking the difference between the stack and the heap). It is also incredibly fun to appreciate how magical it is that these complicated machines we use are just built from these simple circuits that you keep building up and building up through the course. Finally, the teachers did a fantastic job of simplifying what could be multiple semesters worth of material to quickly give you the gist of things like assembly languages, without oversimplifying.
Really can't recommend this enough if you have the time to do it. FWIW, the first part of the course (from NAND gates to building a CPU) is very fun and fairly easy. The second part (going from a computer to a full operating system) is quite a bit more work.
This course does an exceptional job of giving you an intuitive understanding of some critical parts of how a computer works that affect higher-level programs and programming languages (for me the biggest aha! was grokking the difference between the stack and the heap). It is also incredibly fun to appreciate how magical it is that these complicated machines we use are just built from these simple circuits that you keep building up and building up through the course. Finally, the teachers did a fantastic job of simplifying what could be multiple semesters worth of material to quickly give you the gist of things like assembly languages, without oversimplifying.
Really can't recommend this enough if you have the time to do it. FWIW, the first part of the course (from NAND gates to building a CPU) is very fun and fairly easy. The second part (going from a computer to a full operating system) is quite a bit more work.