One of the four books we are using this semester is the Computer Science: An Overview (12th Edition). We are only using the first five chapters for the introductory course.
These are the introduction chapter which covers the role of algorithms and some of the history of computing. The second chapter covers basic data storage such as memory, mass storage, the binary system and representing information as bit patterns, the third chapter covers data manipulation where we discuss computer architecture, machine language, program execution, forth chapter covers operating systems and the fifth chapter covers networking and the Internet. The book comes with a voucher code for accessing their companion website for twelve months and the site includes activities, simulators, self-study quizzes.
I’ve been working for years in the field without really knowing a lot about the early history of computing, so it was nice to get a read up on the history of computing provided by this book and get a better understanding of why things turned out the way they did.
This book is a lot more expensive than your average Cisco certification book. Expect to pay $126-ish on Amazon.