This is the first of the weekly reading guides for Computer Science 100. The theme of this course is structured complexity .
Computers are complex.
This is because their complexity is organized or structured . The same is true for computer programs, which are actually even more complex than the computers on which they run. There are many levels , or steps, to get from transistors to computers, but each level is just a moderate step in complexity above the previous one. You can understand computers by tackling their complexity one step at a time. The same is true about computer programs .