How Computers Work — The Big Picture

How Computers Work — The Big Picture covers: Petzold's Code, Computer Science Distilled. Build a mental model of the entire computer stack — from electricity to logic gates to CPU to memory to operating system to applications. No prerequisites. No code. Just understanding. When you type rails server, here is what actually happens (at the systems level you are about to learn): The shell process forks a new process (Module 3). That process loads the Ruby interpreter (Module 7 — it's a program like any other). Ruby parses your code into an AST and compiles it to YARV bytecode (Module 7). The bytecode executes on the CPU (Module 2) using memory managed by the OS (Module 3). Puma opens a TCP socket (Module 4) and listens for HTTP requests. Every incoming connection allocates memory (Module 3), processes the request through your middleware stack, queries PostgreSQL over another TCP socket, and returns a response. Module 0 gives you the vocabulary to understand each piece. The rest of this curriculum fills in the details.