For the hobbyist building their first 8-bit computer on a breadboard (a popular trend in the maker community right now), Foster is arguably more useful than a modern textbook. Modern books discuss gigahertz clock speeds and pipelining. Foster discusses the fundamentals: "If the clock ticks, the data moves here."
Foster’s writing style is a cure for this passivity. He doesn't just tell you that a computer uses two's complement for negative numbers; he explains why it makes the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) simpler to design. computer architecture caxton foster
One of the lasting contributions of Foster’s book was his clear delineation of computer structures. He categorized computers not just by speed, but by how they organized their internal traffic. For the hobbyist building their first 8-bit computer