Dark Liquid

Haven’t posted in a while. I’ve been crazy busy, not quite sure what with but it seems like I’m always doing something else and never have enough time for anything recently.

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to talk about was the ridiculous prices of some books I’ve been looking at recently.

As some people might already be aware, I’m working on designing a computer architecture from scratch in my spare time. I’m using Verilog to synthesise the hardware because it’s prohibitively expensive to play around with this kind of thing with discrete logic chips, not to mention difficult and unwieldy. Now, I don’t really know Verilog very well so I’m learning it as I go, I also don’t know much about some kinds of optimisations you can make to do things like binary multiplication happen quickly in hardware. With that in mind, I thought I might buy some books on the subject.

Or not, because they are all over £100!!!

What the hell!? I can understand that there would be a premium on specialist knowledge like that, but what about hobbyists? Self-learning materials are either non-existent or prohibitively expensive or aren’t self-learning materials at all and are instead reference guides for people who are already experts. There are tons of cool things I’d like to learn but don’t have the time or inclination to sit down with a tutor and learn properly. Besides, so far everything job-wise that’s gone right for me has happened as a result of things I’ve taught myself, so paying for education from someone else isn’t something I’m too hot on.

With these issues in mind, I’m going to do my best to document my learning process so that others can follow it. Hopefully someone will find it useful or entertaining in some way.