What one fool can do, another can. - Silvanus Phillips Thompson

Growing up, I always saw hardware as an impenetrable mystery reserved for the high machine priests. However, I found a course that demystified that most mystical of hardware creatures: the CPU. What’s even better, the course is free to all and requires absolutely no prior knowledge.

Welcome to Nand 2 Tetris! To be fair, it is designed to be the most simple introduction possible, so this is not going to make you understand modern hardware architecture. But it’s a great start. Even if you don’t care at all about hardware, it gets you thinking about complex systems as merely layers of simple systems, and that’s a valuable skill unto itself.