Books for Prep | |
 - Poorly organized and has lots of filling materialThe book presents computer architecture around MIPS and supporting hardware organization. Division of the book into printed material and extra material on CD is a bad choice. One ends up printing the CD material anyway. Especially, it is always good to have a quick digital design review at the beginning of a Computer Organization course. But the review is pushed onto the CD. The authors claim they made this weird choice to keep the the size of the book in check. They could have achieved this easily by adjusting the unnecessarily large typeface used in the book. They could omit most of their "insight providing" "pits and fallacies" sections. Most of this material can be covered in the standard text. Instead, the authors choose to give common sense arguments a prophetic voice. Along the same lines, they should omit their recurring rant about Intel and how they screwed up the nice RISC architecture the authors helped invent. The book has editing problems throughout. The diagrams are full of mistakes. There are repeated paragraphs. The text has a poor flow. Some remarks and arguments do not make sense unless the reader is already very familiar with the topic, which is not usually the case for an undergraduate student. I recommend Parhami's book Computer Architecture: From Microprocessors to Supercomputers (Oxford Series in Electrical and Computer Engineering) instead. This book basically has the same material and it does it right. Rating:  - Must Read - gem of its kindI'm a software developer and avid reader of math and tech books. This book is a gem of its kind. Positives: 1. Each line in this book has a purpose and you'll definitely learn 2. The author didn't assume you to be a dumb reader; rather he'll influence you enough to come up with your own computer design. 3. For any reader, all the questions that could arise from learning each page will be answered sooner or later. I was impressed. Warning: This book uses MIPS instruction set rather than x86 or Pentium instructions. But as I said the author has a purpose for everything - simplicity in this case. Readers looking for a good treatment of x86 architecture should be warned. Readers who are new to the subject should be glad to know that after finishing this book you'll be able make every sense out of Intel's manual and developer's guide. Happy reading... Rating: - Good Reference, Easy ReadingI like the layout of the book, it works great as a reference, but since I am just beginning my education of computer architecture, I'm actually just reading through it. The first chapter is bland, covering basic computer knowledge topics, such as how mice work. After that, the book's depth increases dramatically. It give through explanations of compilers and assemblers with ample examples in C and assembly language. There are hints of Java-based examples, but I haven't read far enough to find them yet. In lab the MIP instruction reference was very handy. Rating:  - Horrible BookThe main problem with this book is that many details are omitted, yet show up in illustrations, examples and problems in the back of the book. Nowhere are these concepts explained, just used. The writing is dry, which could be forgiven if this were a quality book. The sections on SPIM do not even come close to showing enough so the reader could actually use it effectively. Many of the diagrams are too cluttered to be of any use whatsoever. I would elaborate and write about specific instances of these problems but I have already put more effort into this review as the authors did for the entire book. Rating: - Not a very good textbookThe examples are cheesy and the author assumes the reader knows more than what the user has to know in a college course at this level. But if you're already knowedgable of this stuff, this can make, probably a descent reference book. I'll be honest, Hennesy, the author, also wrote the computer architecture, quantitative approach book. This book is lousy. Its like their books are written for decorations. They over complicate everything. Even simple binary add examples are overly complicated, for they use 32 bit words opposed to simple 4 bit words. They're explanations on how they're deriving answers are pretty much useless are non-existence. I'm currently taking a computer architecture couse using this book, and I took the quantitative course in undergrad. Both times I have been sadly disappointed by Hennesy. Unfortunately, he's like the bible writer for these 2 courses. I hope a new more elaborate bible is written in the near future. This guy elaborates on absolutely nothing, and his visual aids are horrible. In association with Amazon.com | |