Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface. Third Edition, Revised

The first few chapters are a bit wasted. If this is your first exposure to computer internals, the material there is densely packed and not so well organized. The authors take a sort of patchy top-down approach to introducing the computer, visiting instructions, high-level languages, compilers, arithmetic, memory addressing, etc. I found a much more coherent and satisfying introduction in Patt's "Introduction to Computing Systems", which starts from transistors and works its way up to C over a whole volume. In all fairness, the authors did include a brief introduction to digital logic in Appendix B.

It's around Chapter 4 that this book really takes off, as the topic shifts to performance and optimization. The explanations are very clear and punctuated with brief, worked-out numerical examples. The discussions of pipelines and memory hierarchy are superb. There are some interesting asides where they compare and contrast the MIPS RISC architecture used throughout the book with Intel's Pentium.

These latter chapters have a certain story-telling quality, with gems of engineering wisdom. It's clear the authors have deep and practical knowledge of their subject. They often revisit the themes of simplicity, measurement and trade-offs as they introduce systems of growing complexity.

For anyone who wants to know how simple processing and memory works. IO devices chapter was so thin as to be useless, but the main parts of the book were comprehensive.

Used as a textbook in class, but I will keep it as a reference due to high quality and readability.

The 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.

I'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...

I 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.