Coursera now has an online course for the highly lauded From Nand2Tetris (and a certificate for €44, which is an even bigger eye-roll than the Google IT Support cert) hosted by Noam and Shocken themselves!

Trying out “Week 1”

At first I felt a little unguided, but I soon put together the pieces they give you and was amazed at how much I began to learn from just doing it. Soon I was creating slightly more complex chips like Mux and even a Mux that can handle a 16 bit bus. Despite each chip edging towards more complexity, the process became much easier, as most of the low level stuff was taken care of by the previous chips.

 They use a watered-down HDL which is nice because I had enough silly mistakes in my thought process already from getting used to functional programming. (I keep toying with the idea of learning Lisp, I’ll take this as a sign.)

The specifications on the left are equivalent to the logical process on the right.

So from these basic building blocks, this course aims to take you all the way through making an OS and coding a Tetris clone in it. From Nand to Tetris!

If you have the time to check this out, I would implore you to. Skip the certification, of course. The computer science you’ll learn from this course is worth the €44, but it’s free, so start today!