Any good computer science textbooks/resources for beginners out there?

[gulpipose]

Hey!

I'm a couple of months into my first semester doing a BCS. And so far things are going really well, however we have this one course that's literally just called "Digital Technology" that I'm kind of struggling to keep up with. The course is split into two where the first part is basically an introduction to how computers work from binary mathematics, through physical hardware, all the way up to GUIs and "user-friendly" software. The second is a quite thorough look at how computer networking and "the internet" works, again working our way from the physical layer up to the application layer. 

 

Do any of you know any good online resources/textbooks that go through all (or some) of this in a somewhat pedagogic way? I've obviously googled a lot around, but if anybody who's maybe been through learning some of the same stuff before have any recommendations that would be amazing !  

 

When I asked my professor he told me that his lectures are "the only syllabus you'll need, just read a wikipedia page if that's not enough for you", not very surprisingly that kind of arrogant statement didn't really help with anything  

[Glennieboyyy007]

i have a course about computer networking. it's kind of the same as your second part. the book i have has 800 pages explaining the layers and some security and wireless stuff.

it's called: computer networking A top-down approach. i have the 7th edition, but the sixth is still very viable. here is a link to an pdf of it

[schwellmo92]

It's going to be easiest to just google the individual parts you're not understanding, I don't think there's an all-encompassing book.

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, gulpipose said:

pedagogic

You don't really want to delve that deeply do you?

 

Ok, here goes....

get yourself a copy of the Cisco Networking Certification manuals. Those tomes (and there are many) will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about how some of this stuff is built.
Or hit up a large sized goodwill and see if these have any comp-sci books from the 80s (or for that matter, the entire time-life series on computers and hardware...I have them, several thousand pages in exquisite detail)

 

[Coaxialgamer]

Coursera has many courses you can use to learn about that sort of stuff.

If you're looking more specifically for computer architecture and organization, i can recommend a course called Nand2tetris ( organization and early 1970's type computing ) , and you also have a more advanced course taught by princeton on the website , where they teach about more modern computer architectures ( pipelining , superscalar , OOOE , multicore etc), but i'd definitely recommend watching introductory courses first.