Rating:  Summary: Difficult read, but worth the effort. Review: This book was not an easy read for me, but if enough time is spent this book is written well enough for an assembly/hardware beginner to grasp it. I had no assembly experience and very little hardware design experience comming into this class, and using this book I was able to do very well in the class, and most importantly understand these concepts. Many people struggled(this is a CS class not EE), but most of these people simply did not put the time into reading the 100+ page chapters. Simply put the book does what its supposed to do very well if you put in the time.
Rating:  Summary: Frustrated & confused Review: This book was written with engineers in mind -not those who don't understand a PC to begin with. This book made me question my sanity with wanting to go forth with my career choice. There has to be a better book out there that is written down to earth so the mere mortal can understand...
Rating:  Summary: Long Chapters and Unstructured Review: This book will take a long time of yours just to comprehend simple concepts on the subject. The book for example took more than 15 pages to explain a simple concept of Binary Multiplication .If you have no choice but to use the book as a required text material, be prepared to spend extra hours in following the concepts of the subject or pay close attention in your class and don't forget to copiously take notes. Because this book is not going to be a good fallback arrangement for understanding the subject.
Rating:  Summary: clear as crystal Review: This is a great book I would say, although the same two authors wrote this book and another one(a quantitative approach), they focus on totally different things. By reading this book, I had a clear view of how hardware and software interfaced. My favorite part is the diagrams of pipeline stages. It just perfectly represent the popular MIPS architecture. I would strongly recommend this book if you are looking for practical reference book for RISC machine. The other computer architecture book(a quantitative approach) is just little bit too theoritical..
Rating:  Summary: Indispensable if you like to bang metal Review: This is one of only three textbooks I kept from school; it's a fantastic introduction to computer architecture. If you like low-level programming or hardware design, this is the book you want to learn from! It's worth every penny.
Rating:  Summary: Lots of content - poor presentation Review: This is yet another classical textbook in a Computer Science undergraduate curriculum. It was recommended heartily by my professor (when in fact he has never used it in the course), but I chose not to buy it. And was glad about it aftewards since after reading half of it in the library I found it 1) Boring 2) Exceedingly and unnecessarily detailed 3) Poorly organized For those of you who don't fall asleep while reading the first 200 pages, this might prove to be a good investment. Otherwise, I'd suggest taking good notes during classes and consulting online references, because this book is just not worth the price (in my opinion, of course).
Rating:  Summary: Great book Review: We use this book in a hardware course at the University of Oslo. It is easy to read and describes every part of a computer. The book is detailed - when you are finished with it you will know enough to design a computer. (Given enough time and money, that is. :-) I can't think of anything negative to say about this book. If you want/need to know how the internals of a computer works then you really need it!
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