Depends on how deep you want/need to go.
The keyword you're looking for is
microelectronics - a special expert's subfield of electronics.
It's about how to design electronic circuits you need to get a computer out of basic electronics parts,
mostly those
logic gates you already knew, memory (
Flipflop),... and oscillators (without a tact everything stands still)
and how those are combined to more complex circuits performing basic operations such as comparations, bitshifts, calculations etc.,
(and how to bring those circuits on a piece of silicon to become a processor).
But before you can go there - if you want go there - you'll need to understand electronics.
physics -> electrical engineering -> electronics -> logical gates (TTL) -> logic circuits (ALUs, registers, memory, multiplexers)
could be a link-chain that may help you.
Depending on the knowledge you already have you may directly join into TTL and ALU
The best way to
really understand things is always do it yourself.
The hard way:
Get yourself a small electronics lab with a breadboard, some electronics parts, a microcontroller, its programmer, and (most expensive) a powersupply, multimeter and an oscilloscope to see/measure things.
Maybe you have a local school, university or know somebody with such a lab who may assist you with it.
And experiment.
You'll learn a lot!
I can recommend two books that may get you into this:
The Art of Electronics, Horowitz and Hill, Cambridge Press
and
"Student Manual for The Art of Electronics", Hayes and Horowitz, dito.
A practical lab handbook with lots of experiments including building a computer and program it.
Another way to learn how electricity becomes information - closing the gap between transistors and software - is to learn Assembler.
Not the the ones you find on today's 64bit architectures - those is high-level programming already ?
As SirDice mentioned: 8bit (or even less)
Go
really down! (You want to get down to OSI Layer 1)
When you've figured out:
On most smaller processors (8bit) there are no 'higher' operations like multiplication, especially not division, sometimes not even substraction,
but on those already amazing things can be done.
Cause all you really need is addition, one's complement, and a handful of other small operations to do anything (it's only the matter of memory and speed then.)
With those you can realize the other three elementary arithmetics.
And having those any mathematical function can be substituted by algorithms containing those four basic operations.
Anything else is just to get and set the status/value of memories and registers by algorithms containing those operations.
When you understand
Assembler commands represent machine code which is binary values, placed into a special register that causes certain circuits to be activated, obtain the according operation onto a another binary value - the value you want to check or manipulate - and how combinations of those primitive steps lead to even higher operations ...until such as blathering rubbish within a forum ...
...then your question is answered.
www.nand2tetris.org
) You build an assembler, virtual machine, and compiler for a high-level language called Jack.
. More important is my happiness that all of my children are better than me in different disciplines, characters or so on.
