(Part 2) Top products from r/ComputerEngineering

Welcome!

You need two books:

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-RISC-V-Architecture/dp/0128122757

Get the original MIPS or later ARM version if you prefer -- they're absolutely fine, and the principles you learn one one apply to everything -- but the RISC-V one is the newest and is the only only one that you're actually legally allowed to make an implementation of at home and distribute, put on github etc.

But of course designing and making your own 16 bit ISA is huge fun, so I definitely recommend that too!

Once you've digested all that, their other book is more advanced. But the first one will get you a long way. This next one is the absolute bible of real computer architects and hardware designers.

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-Approach-Kaufmann/dp/0128119055

That's by these guys, who originally invented the RISC-I and MIPS processors in the early 80s, invented the term "RISC" (and also RAID, btw). They recently received the Turing award for their lifetime efforts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LVeEjsn8Ts

Join comp.arch on usenet / google groups. There are lots of actual working or retired computer architects there, and they're helpful to energetic students and amateurs designing their own toy stuff.

It might not be exactly what you're looking for, but my school has a required freshman computer architecture class based around the LC-3 architecture. It's more simple than x86 or ARM, but it can run the C language, and in my experience, is better for an intro to architecture.

The slides are all online for free: https://wiki.illinois.edu/wiki/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=697870760

The first ~half of the slides to my memory aren't architecture specific, and they have lots of info on gate level architecture, which seems like what you are looking for.

There is also a companion book to the course that wasn't required, but was pretty helpful/well written: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Computing-Systems-Gates-Beyond/dp/0072467509/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=patt+and+patel&qid=1566327880&s=gateway&sr=8-1

And if you want to look into LC-3 assembly coding, there are LC-3 simulators/compilers available for download online as well.

If you wanna go deeper with the hardware, this is the book my university used. It contains a lifetime of knowledge. However, it is nowhere close to the readability of Code. Where I found code to be friendly and inviting, this book is more of a grind through 100 pages in 2 months and question your existence type of thing. For OS stuff, we used this one. I'd say its a lot more friendly to read than the architecture book, but really as you go deeper into both of these subjects, they don't get friendlier.

Read the C Programming Language, it will help you in your course.
https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-2nd-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0131103628

You can probably take a look at the basic architecture book by Hennessy and Patterson. It's the most commonly used starter book and has decent explanations of opcode and how instructions work. It does however use a made up version of ARM, but still covers the basics.