Jeremy's Updates

Jeremy is on page 57 of 122 of Tidy First?

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 12:37:29 -0700

Jeremy Huiskamp is on page 57 of 122 of Tidy First?.

Jeremy is 86% done with On Tyranny

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 12:37:17 -0700

Jeremy Huiskamp is 86% done with On Tyranny.

Jeremy is currently reading 'Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design'

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 02:26:36 -0700

Jeremy is currently reading Tidy First?: A Personal Exercise in Empirical Software Design by Kent Beck

Jeremy wants to read 'Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts'

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 14:07:29 -0700

Jeremy wants to read Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

Jeremy wants to read 'The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection'

Tue, 11 Mar 2025 13:48:36 -0700

Jeremy wants to read The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection by Diego Gambetta

Jeremy is currently reading 'On Tyranny'

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 13:59:57 -0700

Jeremy is currently reading On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder

Jeremy has read 'The Dictionary of Lost Words'

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 02:36:24 -0800

Jeremy has read The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Jeremy added 'The Mikado Method'

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 08:32:25 -0800

Jeremy gave 4 stars to The Mikado Method (Paperback) by Ola Ellnestam

Jeremy commented on Jeremy's review of The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 14:58:39 -0800

New comment on Jeremy's review of The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas
by David Patterson

Oops, missed a critical “not�� in the final sentence. Fixed now, thanks for pointing that out.

Jeremy added 'The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas'

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 14:55:41 -0800

Jeremy gave 5 stars to The RISC-V Reader: An Open Architecture Atlas (Paperback) by David Patterson
bookshelves: prog
The book claims to be aimed at assembly language developers who already know at least one other architecture. That isn't really me. I did the usual m68k course in university 20 years ago and have mostly been working in much higher-level languages ever since. I don't really have any intention of developing software for risc-v.

I picked this up because I wanted to refresh myself on machine-language-level concepts, on a modern architecture, and risc-v seemed like it would be much more approachable than intel or arm.

Overall, I found this very readable, and it taught me a lot. Being unfamiliar with assembly programming in general, I had to think pretty hard about some of it to understand how it works, but that was doable and I found it rewarding. There were frequent comparisons to intel and arm, which I guess were meant to be helpful for people familiar with those architectures, but for me, just helped to understand how some of the design decisions could vary.

At this point though (2024), the book seems a bit outdated. For example, the chapter on vector instructions didn't have the detailed instruction formats because they hadn't been formalized at the time. But when I went to look them up in the current version of the spec, it seemed that the vector extension had been completely replaced. Not a big deal for me though, as I was only interested in a conceptual overview rather than the implementation specifics, but it's probably not the best place to start for the actual target audience in future.