Professor Robert Plantz at Sonoma State University has put up an eBook for a course on the Introduction to Computer Organization.

ARM Assembly Language Using the Raspberry Pi covers a great amount of information.

This book introduces the concepts of how computer hardware works from a programmer’s point of view. A programmer’s job is to design a sequence of instructions that will cause the hardware to perform operations that solve a problem. This book looks at these instructions by exploring how C/C++ language constructs are implemented at the instruction set architecture level.

The specific architecture presented in this book is the ARM® as implemented on the Raspberry Pi®. The operating system is Raspbian, which is based on a Linux kernel and includes a GNU programming environment.

The basic guidelines I followed in creating this book are:

• Understanding how the hardware works helps you to become a better programmer.

• Learning is easier if it builds upon concepts you already know.

• “Real world” hardware and software make a more interesting platform for learning theoretical concepts.

• The tools used for teaching should be inexpensive and readily available.

You can find the book online here.