Rating: 
Summary: An Interesting Step-by-Step Aproach
Review: I use this book as a reference in my technical writing.I recommend this book to everyone who have a basic Assembly Language programming background and want to understand everything behind the Machine Language Operation Codes decoding process. The authors build from scratch (and you learn from scratch): * How to build a complete Arithmetic and Logic (ALU) Unit
- Basic Logic Gates processing
- more advanced topics as Ripple Carry * How to build a complete Control Unit to guide the ALU Operation
- Microprogramming vs. Hardwired Control Implementation * Assembly language examples for programming the Control Unit Is a good Technical Book in this area. Complement the study of this book with a review of the Assembly Language Programming presented in the book "The Art of Computing Programming", Volume 1 by Donald Knuth (also, if you need more application examples of low level programming, review Volume 3 "Sorting and Searching"). This is a very good study track.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad
Review: I used this book to learn about computer hardware and architecture. One must realize that the subject matter (that the book discusses) is quite difficult and requires much thought. In spite of the difficulty of the material, the book explains topics quite well. It focuses on specific computer architecture implementations. Thus, it is mainly up to the readers to understand the implementations by reading the book carefully, and ask themselves if there are better ways to implement the computer design. The book is a bit verbose. I wish it were more succinct. Also, the book could have done a better job explaining the esoteric topics in even more detail such as virtual memory. It also could have provided more examples to help the reader understand why the various designs work. Overall, not a bad book, but it is certainly not for beginners that have no previous knowledge of basic digital design (such as MUXes, decoders, encoders, gates, flip-flops, state diagrams, state tables, K-maps, etc.).
Rating:
Summary: What's love got to do with it ... ?
Review: I was dumped by my ex-girl friend. So I picked up this book and two other two brick-like paper objects to keep my mind occupied. I find this book not very difficult to understand, though I did not do many of the exercises. I especially like its historical perspective. I will move on to Hennessy and Patterson next week. I'll let Silbershatz and Galvin be my friends this week. "I have my books, and my peotry to protect me."
Rating: 
Summary: Beating around the bush?
Review: I was required to read this text for a Computer Design Class, and must say it was anything but an easy read. The book could be commended for being very comprehensive and thorough, but don't expect to speed-read through this one. The author for some reason decided that it would be a good idea to teach you the concepts presented in the book backwards, tell you "oops, just kidding", then explain how you really do it. This can lead to hours of confusion and frustration, trust me. Also, my instructor (thank god for him), often times told the class to skip over relatively large sections of the book on a normal basis, because true to form, it tends to be entirely thorough with information that is not entirely pertinent. Often times even when very clear about what was presented in the chapter, you'll find yourself confused after reading 15 pages, in which a simple idea was presented. If you can avoid this book, you'd be well advised to do so. I'd like to burn my copy. Oh, only if.
Rating: 
Summary: Verbose, confusingly organized, skips concepts
Review: I'm having to read this book because it is the required text for my MS program at Johns Hopkins University, MD. I just hope others do not end up in a situation like mine, i.e. a combination of a lousy instructor and this ridiculous book which does not go in an orderly fashion to describe concepts. It tries to cover too much ground and results in disconnected reading. Concepts are not put forth in an orderly and understandable manner. You'll need other companion books to support the contents of this book. Your only hope of getting anything out of this course and book is if you have a good instructor. But then if you have a good instructor, I don't think he/she would choose this book. This book is suitable for instructors who are themselves confused and this book helps to maintain that level of confusion throughout the course.
Rating:
Summary: Good for students
Review: If this book is a required reading in a college junior level computer architechture design course, then this book excellently serves that purpose. However, as a reference, this book is poor considering the slow pace at which concepts are developed.
Rating:
Summary: This is a profoundly good book.
Review: If you want to learn how computers work this is a great book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent introduction
Review: If you want to understand how modern computers really work, this book is an excellent choice. The book focuses on the MIPS architecture. This is unusual, in this Intel-oriented world, but in the end, the Pentium is nothing but a RISC-computer with a complicated instruction decoder. And with the understanding you get, it will be easy to transfer your knowledge to other architectures and computers. The book makes a fantastic job of explaining how micro-processors work, how virtual memory, cache-hierarchies, and pipelining affect your programs performance, how to optimize assembly code, how circuits combine to build the arithmetical logic units inside the CPU, and the issues involved in designing and programming for multiprocessor computers and clusters. If you are a computer programmer, or beginning hardware engineer student, this book is for you. A basic course in programming would be advantageous.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Book
Review: If you're interested in the subject matter, I don't think you'll find a better book. Very interesting to read; great examples. Definitive.
Rating: 
Summary: long-winded and repetitive
Review: Large sections are repeated over and over again. Every ten pages or so, the entire subset of MIPS instructions are repeated. I would have been grateful for a more condensed version of the book. A large quantity of whitespace exists on each page. With some editing, this book would be great. I'd have been grateful for something smaller, lighter, less wasteful of paper, easier to lug around, not to mention with less reading material. It could have been done in 200 pages.
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