Rating: 
Summary: The best book available on Pentium optimization
Review: "Inner Loops" is an excellent book for advanced programmers trying to get the most out of the 486, Pentium, and Pentium Pro. The book primarily targets the plain Pentium, though, and I'd like to see an update covering Pentium II and III. Many of the author's favorite tricks are specifically designed for the Pentium, and actually run slower on the Pentium Pro-core chips, but he does address this issue. There is a nice Pentium Pro section, but the author doesn't clearly explain why certain PPro instruction sequences can seem to execute in zero or negative time, so it seems like plain Pentium was the primary testing platform. Also, the example programs are all DOS-based, which seems curious for a new book, but it didn't get in the way of understanding the examples.
Rating:
Summary: This is the One
Review: "Inner Loops" is The Book To Have if you're interested in optimized x86 assembly. I know of no other book that covers so completely all the details a programmer needs to write assembly specific to the 486, Pentium, and PPro. Very few details are missing, and even more is here that I could find nowhere else.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Introduction to Code Optimization
Review: For those who have never before had to worry about source code performance optimization, this is the first book you want to read. It will introduce you to basic, common techniques for performance optimization of your source code.The text is programming language independent and can be easily understood by anyone who has taken a basic programming course (which I hope you have done by now, because you can't optimize code if you can't even program it). I gave this introductory text three stars because it is just that, an introductory text. If you want advanced performance optimizations -- I'm programming an operating system or compiler kind of depth -- then look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Introduction to Code Optimization
Review: For those who have never before had to worry about source code performance optimization, this is the first book you want to read. It will introduce you to basic, common techniques for performance optimization of your source code. The text is programming language independent and can be easily understood by anyone who has taken a basic programming course (which I hope you have done by now, because you can't optimize code if you can't even program it). I gave this introductory text three stars because it is just that, an introductory text. If you want advanced performance optimizations -- I'm programming an operating system or compiler kind of depth -- then look elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: Excellant resource for fine tuning your code
Review: I found this book to be an invaluable aid in fine tuning my code. Not just for the detailed information about the true performance of the various Intel processors, but also the excellant algorithms for some very common problems.This book needs to be owned by anyone doing serious assembly programming
Rating:
Summary: Great reference - lots of interesting information
Review: If you are an experienced C/C++ programmer who thinks that pointer arithmetic is better than array notation for "performance" reasons, then you better get this book cause the world has passed you by. (See page 155 of Rick's excellent book.) If you are at all interested in real performance issues and you find yourself making coding decisions like pointer arithmetic or control flow type (while (i--), or while (--i)), then you need to read this book cause its filled with interesting examples of what different things compile to, how long they *should* take, and how long they *really* take. The only negative I have is that it's a bit old now, and doesn't cover the Pentium II/III. But, much of the Pentium Pro / Pentium information can be extrapolated.
Rating:
Summary: Best book I found on the subject...
Review: The book is starting to be outdated but I did not find a better book on the subject. Teaches a few assembly tricks to help you get a bit of performance. At least it covers Pentium (only Pentium I and Pentium Pro though). When is the second edition coming out? Unless you are already an advanced assembly programmer, you will learn something in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Suberb Book, Second Edition Please!
Review: There are so many computer books that have second editions which add little to the original text. This book deserves a second edition by covering; MMX (when this book was written only the MMX spec from Intel was available, so the author does his best) SSE & 3DNow! & SSE2 Instructions (SIMD FPU rogramming) PII, PIII, & Athlon coverage Encoding / Decoding of Audio and Video Streams
Rating: 
Summary: - the theory and practice of getting top PC code performance
Review: This book is an outgrowth of a longstanding fascination I've had with fast code, performance prediction, and the several generations of PC processors. I wanted to not only cover the principles of assembly language and C code optimization, but present some important algorithms analyzed and implemented according to those principles. So I wrote the book I would want to read (and which I hope others will want to read) about how to take a PC to the edge of the envelope. Reader feedback/questions are encouraged
Rating:
Summary: Although good, not Meeting the expection
Review: This book is for you if you are first time writing some code keeping performance in mind but may not be very useful for experience programmer. I found it collection of many techniques at one place but nothing absolutely new.
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