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Rating: 
Summary: Groundbreaking, Holistic
Review: I have never seen any book take such a holistic approach to the art of optimization. Sure there are plenty of books out there that talk about loop unrolling, cache alignment and instruction scheduling, but there are none like this one. You'd better hold on tight though this book is not for the faint of heart. Kris takes you on a detailed tour of the memory architecture of contemporary (PIII, P4 and Athlon) machines, examining in great detail the precise costs associated with each and every memory access. Only in this book will you find a comparison of timing between DRAM, FPM, EDO BEDO, SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, RDRAM. The text although straight and to the point is sparingly littered with amusing and sometimes sarcastic comments that work well to lighten the deep subject matter.My only complaints are that the text reads as if it has been translated from Russian (Which it probably has) and that there are too few chapters and too many sections. If you are serious about optimization techniques - read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Groundbreaking, Holistic
Review: I have never seen any book take such a holistic approach to the art of optimization. Sure there are plenty of books out there that talk about loop unrolling, cache alignment and instruction scheduling, but there are none like this one. You'd better hold on tight though this book is not for the faint of heart. Kris takes you on a detailed tour of the memory architecture of contemporary (PIII, P4 and Athlon) machines, examining in great detail the precise costs associated with each and every memory access. Only in this book will you find a comparison of timing between DRAM, FPM, EDO BEDO, SDRAM, DDR SDRAM, RDRAM. The text although straight and to the point is sparingly littered with amusing and sometimes sarcastic comments that work well to lighten the deep subject matter. My only complaints are that the text reads as if it has been translated from Russian (Which it probably has) and that there are too few chapters and too many sections. If you are serious about optimization techniques - read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Simply wrong - and no insights
Review: I'm working in the compiler backend for a large computer company in Silicon Valley, CA, USA. I'm sorry to say, but this book is complete garbage. I have never seen such a condensed selection of painfully wrong statements, outright speculation, and serious lack of insight.
My favorite quote kind of tells it all, page 339: "Optimization can eliminate most programming bugs and blunder"
I life only was so easy ;-) The list of errors and mistakes is just too long. I got so angry reading this book, I actually took out color markers:
'Green' for 'good observation',
'yellow' for 'debatable',
'red' for 'plain wrong'.
After I colored nearly every single page with 'red', I decided to do what I've never done before - warn fellow potential readers.
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