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I have never learned something linearly troughout my journey when it comes to any CS topic, but I have recently wanted to read the Intel Architecture book, but I find that I can barely get trough it since there are too many terms, concepts, etc. that I am unaware of and it makes it really hard to go trough.

Is there some sort of easier path I can take in terms of learning? Some book I can read first in order to have an easier time getting trough the Intel manual?

ghzcrlvct wrote:I have never learned something linearly troughout my journey when it comes to any CS topic, but I have recently wanted to read the Intel Architecture book, but I find that I can barely get trough it since there are too many terms, concepts, etc. that I am unaware of and it makes it really hard to go trough.

Is there some sort of easier path I can take in terms of learning? Some book I can read first in order to have an easier time getting trough the Intel manual?

There are no shortcuts to learning. Everything you learn will be built upon your previous learning.

That said, I find the Intel CPU architecture a headache... start with a cleaner design, MIPS is the poster boy here... if you want something with more real world application (and therefore lots of great example code) you could try the original ARM or the 68000... if you are new to CPUs in general then definitely start much simpler like the 6502.

ghzcrlvct wrote:I have never learned something linearly troughout my journey when it comes to any CS topic, but I have recently wanted to read the Intel Architecture book, but I find that I can barely get trough it since there are too many terms, concepts, etc. that I am unaware of and it makes it really hard to go trough.

Is there some sort of easier path I can take in terms of learning? Some book I can read first in order to have an easier time getting trough the Intel manual?

I'm sure there are some books which introduce important concepts and terms.
I'm not sure which books those are. I think I learned from an Assembler book. Maybe you should start application development. Because there you can learn concepts step by step. You know, algorithms, memory map, DMA, IO ports and binary logic etc. Then you can understand the Intel doc (and OS dev in general) better.

I must admit I'm not very happy with the Intel manuals, too. But I use it occasionally to look up some detail.

Greetings
Peter

Try the AMD manuals.

iansjack wrote:Try the AMD manuals.

I wholeheartedly encourage this approach. Not only are the AMD manuals infinitely more readable, there are particular technical details that they state outright that the Intel manuals fail to describe clearly.

Intel (and AMD) manuals are references and not meant to be read from front to back.

You don't read a dictionary from front to back either, do you?