Write Great Code (Volume I: Understanding the Machine), by Randall Hyde, wants to help you write better software by teaching you more about the hardware. I found the book quite fascinating when I didn’t find it uninteresting. I skimmed through his software implementations of floating-point operations, the design of a hypothetical instruction set, and some of the other really deep material, so I ended up really enjoying the book overall.

I enjoyed the refresher on how floating-point works. I’ve never paid much attention to hardware, so I learned a lot about what the data buses are and how they’re used, how memory is accessed, what a wait state is, etc. I thought I knew Boolean logic until I read (and then skimmed) chapter 8. I learned a lot about I/O in the last chapter as well.

The less you understand about the hardware, the more you stand to gain from reading this book. I don’t intend to leverage the material to go out and exercise premature optimization in all of my future code, of course; after all, code should be written for humans, not machines, until it becomes clear that there’s a performance problem.

I’m somewhat tempted to read Hyde’s other book, The Art of Assembly Language. However, from what I can tell, that book teaches you how to write assembly language in HLA (High-Level Assembly). I’d be much better off learning how to read assembly language for x86 processors, since that still comes in handy when debugging high-level languages.

I highly recommend this book to anyone that knows more about software than hardware, and I’m looking forward to Volume II: Thinking Low-Level, Writing High-Level.