Rating: 
Summary: Practical, nice layout, a wealth of information
Review: My lecturer told the students it was the best book in the world. I don't exactly agree with him, but I must say that it is one of the best book in its class. The good points are pretty much sumed up by Amazon's review.I am currently using it as a text, and I have the same problem as Craig because there is no way I can check if my answers are right on my own. END
Rating: 
Summary: Ugghhh my head burns
Review: Ouch, difficult text to grasp but indispensible in understanding assembly and basic computer architecture. As a student at Purdue University I found this book expensive and needed to be read several times, but I got an A in CS250 with it.
Rating:
Summary: good information, a bit lengthy.
Review: overall, a very clear and understandable book. examples and motivation was very well presented. some of the material on system performance (first chapter) could be skimmed/trimmed to obtain the vital information quickly. i would also wager some of the beefier chapters could be trimmed without losing clarity (some passages seemed redundent)
Rating:
Summary: A Standard for Computer Organization Literature
Review: Patterson & Hennessy are the leaders in computer literature and this book is one of the reasons. I purchased the book as an optional text for a college course, but it has quickly become my personal choice for a main text. This book gives great in-depth analysis of the levels of computer organization like no other book uncovered thus far. A must buy if studying this material in college or if looking for a complete reference text.
Rating:
Summary: Great as an introduction, and good as reference material
Review: Rather than being a boring, bland and dry text, COMPUTER ORGANIZATION & DESIGN is a well-written and very informative introduction to many hardware and software fundamentals that should be known by anyone with interest in this field. It's a little wordier than it probably could be, but I found the style of the writing to be a great help at teaching myself these sometimes obscure topics. It succeeds at being both a teacher and a reference book. The authors had the clever idea of introducing many of the concepts from a historical perspective, tracing the beginnings of ideas up to their current implementations. This makes the narrative much less dry than it could have been (let's face it, hardware design isn't exactly riveting material) but makes for a great introduction. The reader gets to see the concepts develop from simpler ideas into the more complicated set-ups of today. Putting the models into that context makes the more difficult concepts easier to grasp. Some discussion concerning this text has revolved around its wordiness. Certainly the book goes into more detail than it probably needs to, and takes longer than necessary to explain certain topics. But to the student or reader encountering these details for the first time, this approach can be extremely rewarding. I found this book to be an excellent teacher. While it took a little bit of time for me to read, it was quite up to the task of clearly and simply explaining the concepts at hand. Each chapter has a section on Fallacies and Pitfalls, which I found particularly helpful. They take a number of the most commonly held misconceptions about the material in that chapter, and clearly and carefully explain why such things aren't true. I found that a lot of what they covered were things that I had either misconstrued or was unclear about so this section was invaluable for me. As reference material, the book covers Processor Performance, Microinstructions, Arithmetic (covers binary and floating-point operations done on the MIPS processor), Processor Pipelining, I/O Interfaces, Multiprocessing, and various other MIPS related subjects. If you looking for something that's primarily reference material, you could probably find a text out there that's a bit more concise. But if you're a little rusty on some of these concepts or are encountering them for the first time, then you could do a lot worse than to teach yourself from this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great as an introduction, and good as reference material
Review: Rather than being a boring, bland and dry text, COMPUTER ORGANIZATION & DESIGN is a well-written and very informative introduction to many hardware and software fundamentals that should be known by anyone with interest in this field. It's a little wordier than it probably could be, but I found the style of the writing to be a great help at teaching myself these sometimes obscure topics. It succeeds at being both a teacher and a reference book. The authors had the clever idea of introducing many of the concepts from a historical perspective, tracing the beginnings of ideas up to their current implementations. This makes the narrative much less dry than it could have been (let's face it, hardware design isn't exactly riveting material) but makes for a great introduction. The reader gets to see the concepts develop from simpler ideas into the more complicated set-ups of today. Putting the models into that context makes the more difficult concepts easier to grasp. Some discussion concerning this text has revolved around its wordiness. Certainly the book goes into more detail than it probably needs to, and takes longer than necessary to explain certain topics. But to the student or reader encountering these details for the first time, this approach can be extremely rewarding. I found this book to be an excellent teacher. While it took a little bit of time for me to read, it was quite up to the task of clearly and simply explaining the concepts at hand. Each chapter has a section on Fallacies and Pitfalls, which I found particularly helpful. They take a number of the most commonly held misconceptions about the material in that chapter, and clearly and carefully explain why such things aren't true. I found that a lot of what they covered were things that I had either misconstrued or was unclear about so this section was invaluable for me. As reference material, the book covers Processor Performance, Microinstructions, Arithmetic (covers binary and floating-point operations done on the MIPS processor), Processor Pipelining, I/O Interfaces, Multiprocessing, and various other MIPS related subjects. If you looking for something that's primarily reference material, you could probably find a text out there that's a bit more concise. But if you're a little rusty on some of these concepts or are encountering them for the first time, then you could do a lot worse than to teach yourself from this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Save yourself the headache
Review: Right off the bat this book is unorganized and has huge leaps of logic. The chapter excercises are painfully unclear, and nearly impossible without a knowledgeable instructor. Given the answers it is clear that the writer "assumes" you picked something up from the chapter that isnt there. The material is simple, put in a fustratingly complex manner. Get a different book if you can, this one isnt worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: Why teachers like this book (and students may too)
Review: Some may wonder why so many teachers, in Universities, Colleges and elsewhere, have selected this textbook among so many other choices. First, this book presents an authoritative introduction on a popular type of architecture: the MIPS architecture. As the basis for the Pentium class of systems, one can hardly avoid a good coverage of MIPS in a Computer Architecture and Design class. Secondly, the authors have taken great pains to indicate common fallacies and pitfalls as well as "real-world" examples (even though they may be slightly outdated since the writing of this book in 1995). Thirdly the book is fairly comprehensive in breadth, if not always in depth. This brings us to the real reason this textbook enjoys popularity among teachers: flexibility. Teachers often use a textbook not as a reference, but as an aide in teaching. Usually this means that the exercises, presentation and diagrams are helpful in covering a particular topic. Patterson and Hennessy provide the essentials of MIPS architecture while leaving enough room for teachers to use their own methods of presentation and emphasis. Since the book makes use of logic design but does not require it as a prerequisite (while giving a very good high-level overview in Appendix B), students from a variety of background (hardware or software) can make use of this book without being held back. A teacher may choose to cover logic design in parallel, or seperately, put more emphasis on pipelining or glossing over it, and either offer an extensive coverage of MIPS assembly or ignore it altogether This effectively allows for a wide berth in teaching possibilities. What's in it for the student? Pay careful attention to your teacher's lecture! (But you know this already) Use this book for its excellent diagrams and for its explanations if you need to understand a particular concept in more details. Use it to do the exercises of course. In the rare event that you understood completely the lecture the first time, do not hesitate to skip ahead to find "Final" diagrams and summary tables. A note on P&H's incremental method: while it may initially present some difficulty for a reader accustomed to receiving ready-made answers, it is an excellent way of understanding the design process which is inherently incremental in scope and functionality. When studying a series of diagrams (such as 5.19-5.24 or 6.31-6.35), visualize the intermediary figures as stills of a picture. The entire sequence of figures may be played in "fast-forward" to see the evolution of a design or the activities along the instruction datapath. The last figure in such a sequence may then better understood and appreciated. Last but not least, do not hesitate to read and consult other references such as Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization, MIPS reference docs available online and MIPS design companies websites. Do not forget what a Computer Architecture and Design class is all about: learning to design your own architecture one day in the real world!
Rating: 
Summary: Book's ok, author's not
Review: The book is difficult reading, but if you need to read it for a class and you spend hours on it, it'll work out. Luckily it does not convey the lack of care for individual students that is characteristic of one of the authors (we'll leave Mr. P unnamed). He doesn't care about students at all, in fact, he sees them as hassles in the way of his greater glory. Back to the book, it's pretty good.
Rating:
Summary: Book's ok, author's not
Review: The book is heavy and difficult reading, however, if you must read it for a class, and you spend countless hours trying to understand it, it might work out for you. Luckily the book does not convey the lack of care for the students that is characteristic one of the authors (we'll leave Mr. P unnamed). He doesn't care about his students as individuals, in fact, he only finds them to be hassles standing in the way of his greater glory. But, back to the book, it's pretty good.
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