Thoughts on the course so far

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Thoughts on the course so far

Mark M
I Am a Control Systems Technician by Profession and am doing this course as a self study course whilst unemployed through Illness.

I Started about 2 weeks ago and am just starting Chapter 5 in the book.

I thought I would post a few thoughts on how I have found the course so far

Chapter 1

I found the HDL a little tricky at first. No built in editor which slows things down a little, and no clear indication in the book about being able to do multiple connections like Chip(in=pointA, out=pointB, out=pointC)
I found Logisim pretty Invaluable to graphically layout and test things.

Chapter 2

It was quite a jump from the adders straight up to the ALU, again Logisim was very useful.

Chapter 3

It would have been nice to have implemented the DFF from Nand  but building the memories from DFFs up was very educational (and fun!) The PC was the trickiest bit I took a while to get the priority logic right. (lots of playing with ANDs and ORs).

Chapter 4

Mult was not too bad but a bit long winded with no shift instruction. Fill was somewhat more tricky I couldn't get it to loop properly until I had a "Eureka" moment (one of many so far). It took a lot more code than I expected but my implementation worked and was really quick (Hint: I tested the keyboard first then branched out to 2 "subroutines")

So far the course has very enjoyable and I have relearned old things I thought I'd forgotten as well as many, many new ones.