Can I go full-on retro and recommend a book from 1953? It's "Faster than thought" by B. V. Bowden... the middle section is a chapter for each of the machines then current in the UK (and a bonus chapter for America), the first chapter is a history but chapters 2 and 3 are about how the machines of the day worked. These were bit-serial machines and you might find it interesting reading - they had limited resources much as you do. The final section is on applications of computers.
Read online:
https://archive.org/stream/FasterThanTh ... 9/mode/1upPDF is 40Mb:
https://archive.org/download/FasterThan ... t_text.pdfMuch less retro is a very interesting book from the late 70s about chip design, which was one of my textbooks in the early 80s. It covers the technology and builds up to a two-chip 16 bit CPU. It's online free as a large PDF. Mead and Conway's "Introduction to VLSI Systems". Chapter 5 at page 269 contains the ALU discussion:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ ... f#page=269Just chapter 5:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ ... Ch5-2s.pdfParent page:
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ ... links.html