JBlitzen wrote:
Those are language books.
For a thoughtful, enjoyable, and comprehensive book on why computers work, I *highly* recommend "Code", by Charles Petzold. Subtitle is something like "The hidden language of computers".
It's relatively short, targeted at non-programmers as much as programmers, and really explains what it is that these devices do, and why, starting at the very beginning of communication history.
Just going based on the Amazon summary, it looks like it's about language theory, not how computers work.
If you want to learn how a computer works (as in, what exactly the CPU does, how memory and IO works), then you want to read a comp. organization or comp. architecture book. Patterson & Hennessy have a couple.