https://contextualelectronics.com
Also, get some edition of Malvino's Electronic Principles. Easiest to understand book I saw looking into electronics.
Back in its heyday 3 years ago, I did a ton of courses on Coursera. They weren't perfect, of course. There was no higher-level coordination that could lead to covering an entire 4-year degree's worth of material and it was hard to match up courses from different institutions with different prereqs. It was hard to find advanced courses in general and the enforced speed at which content was expected to be completed sucked.
But the automated graders were great. I went through parts of many, many courses before having to abandon them due to work pressures and I finished a few, like the scala course and the fantastic automata course and some stuff from Berkeley before they bailed and moved to edX. It wasn't ideal for adult independent learners, but Coursera used to provide real value, especially for introducing niche topics that wouldn't be available via OCW.
It's a pity they never figured out a business model that would fit what its learners really wanted and just threw up a paywall instead.
They still let you watch the videos but generally don't let you take the quizzes or submit assignments to the auto-grader anymore.
http://cyrilandersontraining.com/2017/02/18/coursera-pay-gra...
The book, btw, is a masterpiece for anyone unfamiliar with the material it covers—particularly for programmers like me who are comfortable with the language layers and up, but to whom the hardware and lower programming layers were a mystery. Getting a simple, but rich enough to be demystifying, understanding of the those layers by actually building them myself was (no exaggeration) a healing experience for me, and made me want to fly to Israel just to hug those guys.
For any programmer who never took courses like this or tinkered at the hardware level, and thus has that alienated feeling of skating on a frozen mystery their whole career, this book is the antidote. It's a classic of economy, given how short it is and how much it covers. Of course it gets through it all by oversimplifying, which you realize the moment you get to a chapter whose topic you already know. But it does get through it all, which is astonishing.
Thanks for the confirmaton, I didn't remember seeing this either.
"The book, btw, is a masterpiece ..."
Agreed. The paper back is a nice format and reasonably priced for a technical book as well:
https://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-P...
You're endorsement adds extra corroboration it might be useful for that. Also, if they keep it simple, might be able to use the FOSS tools like Qflow and ABC.
In Part II, when they introduce the java like programming language, the assignment is to write a game. One can write whatever game they wish. Tetris is one possibility. I myself wrote Tetris so I know it is possible, and it is possible to implement using the architecture developed in the class. However, not everyone is forced to implement Tetris at that point. They have the freedom to choose other classic games, or even new games if they wish.
After this assignment comes both the full compiler and the implementation of the operating system.
NAND does refer to NAND gates. no the course doesn't start from hardware. a (java based) simulator is used to simulate the most fundamental building block.
and then things go from there.
take a look at the following: http://www.nand2tetris.org/ for more information.
Part 2 starts from that assembly and goes into developing a higher-level object-oriented language called "Jack", then a compiler and operating system.
