Ah Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software I can only say complimentary things about this book.

The book starts off talking about different types of codes used to communicate, including different languages, morse code, braille and flag signals (if I recall that correctly). But all of this is just to prepare for understanding how binary can be exchanged for any system of communication.

It moves on to talk about logic gates and how to create a modern computer using just relays and electrical signals. That said to get to a modern computer (I think it was a 8 byte adder with memory storage), it required around 5 million relays. So the advent of the silicon computer chip really cut all that down from having super sized IBM machines down to the magical =Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy= mobile phone computers we carry around today.

It talks about ASCII, UTF, assembly language, modern programming languages... basically everything for early stage computing in a story telling way. Great for me since I didn't have that Computer Science background to get a better idea of what's happening lower level that impacts all the higher level stuff I normally work on.