As someone who knows little or nothing about computers, I'm rather disappointed by (((Noam Nisan))) and (((Shimon Schocken))). I have seen their book being praised quite often so I decided to read it but it doesn't really deliver what it promises. It purportedly claims to show you how to build a computer form scratch but I'm halfway through the book and I have at least two major issues with it:
>DFFs are black boxes (so much for building everything with NAND gates)
>assemblers, VMs, and compilers are written in some other language that is taken for granted (why bother with creating a language if you already assume I have one I can use?)
At least "But How Do It Know?" by Clark Scott tried to explain how the clock works using feedback loops (even if that book didn't have much to say about software).
Is there any other book that explains in more detail how computers are built "from scratch"? In particular I would like to know how was it possible to build assemblers and compilers without any pre-existing language.