Circuitry books: five textbooks on logic and digital design

Lists of books on circuitry are usually built on a single rule: read this one and you will become an engineer. In practice, books on circuitry solve different problems, and picking the first one you come across is a reliable way to spend a month on something you do not need. Below are five books most often recommended to people who design digital circuits. Each has its own depth, its own audience, and its own place on the route. The breakdown is organized by what each book explains best and who it is for. Which book suits which part of the path is listed on the Circuit Design page.

How to choose at all

The answer to "which book is the best one" almost always comes down to three checks. Do you want to understand the physics of a component, or are design rules enough? Are you ever going to build a whole chip, or is the job adders and levels? And what language are you willing to read in: English technical prose changes your reading speed a great deal.

Note the wording of the "main subject" column: it describes what a book explains best, not what it leaves out. None of these five covers the whole field of circuitry, and nobody expects a book to.

The Elements of Computing Systems: the route from NAND to a system

Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken wrote a textbook with unusual dramaturgy: it walks the reader along the whole path of a computing machine and skips no link. First a logic gate and how to build it out of transistors, then processor architecture and the instruction set, then a hardware description language, then an assembler, then an operating system. Every chapter rests on the result of the previous one, and by the end you have a working machine instead of a pile of unrelated facts.

The main reason this book is recommended here is that its route matches the course. Ershov Computer follows the same path in short steps, with a simulator instead of a soldering iron. The book explains what the simulator showed but did not explain: why Harvard architecture is convenient, what a pipeline is, and why a cache solves a problem rather than hiding it.

Digital Design and Computer Architecture: one coherent course

Dave Harris and Sarah Harris wrote the textbook most often recommended to students, because it covers both halves of the subject: logic and architecture. The first part covers combinational logic, Boolean algebra, Karnaugh maps, and circuit synthesis. The second covers sequential logic, finite state machines, synchronous reset, and machine design procedure. The third and fourth cover building blocks: datapaths, memory, arithmetic, pipelining, caches, the instruction set, and I/O.

The book rests on one running example: first you design a single unit, then you assemble units into a processor and test it. The appendices work through examples in a hardware description language, so the book pairs well with part 3 of the course, where you write Verilog modules.

The authors' second book, Digital Design: Principles and Practices, is the one to pick if you are moving from reading schematics to describing them in a language. It systematically covers how to describe combinational and sequential logic in HDL, VHDL, and SystemVerilog, with emphasis on how the same unit is written in each. If you have already worked through levels 30 to 43, this book is closer to where you are than the previous one.

Structured Computer Organization: why a processor is built this way

Andrew Tanenbaum and Morris Austin wrote a book with a different aim: not "how to design" but "how it is built and why it is built that way". A processor is taken apart layer by layer: pipelines, superscalar execution, the cache hierarchy, virtual memory, interrupts, the I/O system. That is why people call it the architecture book.

Reading it end to end for the sake of a logic simulator makes no sense. But once you reach Harvard architecture and the program counter, the question "what does this look like in a real processor" appears on its own, and this book answers it better than the others.

Free and legitimate routes

These five paid books have two respectable substitutes, one on price and one on access. The Nand2Tetris course by Nisan and Schocken publishes its materials and tools openly: simulator, assembler, compiler, and step-by-step assignments, plus a cheap edition of the book sold by the authors themselves. The MIT OpenCourseWare course 6.004 Computation Structures is published in full, with lectures and assignments. Verilog practice lives on HDLbits, and you can draw a circuit and see what comes out in the browser with the Falstad Circuit Simulator.

Everything listed runs with nothing to install and no payment. The logic circuit simulator here covers the same ground: assemble a circuit, feed it a vector, get a truth table, and see whether it matches.

Which chapter to start with

The practical answer, if there is no time for debate: take The Elements of Computing Systems if you intend to build a complete machine; Digital Design and Computer Architecture if you want an academically strict course in logic; The Art of Electronics (reviewed here) if you are going to work with real hardware. After that, by taste. Reading two books in parallel works better than five one after another: logic theory and architecture answer each other, and the gaps in one are closed by the other.

For what a person who reads these books does for a living, see the schematics engineer. The open architecture standard that comes up in any conversation about processors is covered in the RISC-V architecture.