Customer Reviews

The Architecture of Computer Hardware and Systems Software: An Information Technology Approach

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book extensively covers the topics in depth, and does a good job at making a complicated subject easy to understand. While for the most part Irv does a good job of communicating technical material in an easy to understand manner, you can only simplify technical details so much, and this book is certainly not for beginners.

After taking the author's class in the subject, I've come to understand that by the end of the book you might hate the author, but at least you'll learn something. One of the more challenging subjects, but you can learn a great deal from this book. Because it's a book in architecture, however, it's important to keep in mind that a great deal of this book is theoretical and not specifically practical to everyday computer usage.

I'm studying BEng Computer Systems Eng, and this book is the best book that I've ever read - clearly explain thoughout from hardware system to software engineering. It covers most of things you need to know about computer. I mean as a perfect introduction.

I used this book for my first year since then I get a lot of benefit from it, love it

H Q Tran

As a student taking a technical look at computers from a non technical background this book dances the fine line of too little detail, and being too technical. I recomend it highly, and use it frequently as a reference around the office.

Okay, first the good news. This is a weighty book with a lot of well presented information. As one of the previous reviewers noted, you can only simplify this kind of technical information so much. I agree with that reviewer that Englander has done a good job in covering such topics as data and computer mathematics, hardware architecture and operation, and software components. The diagrams are generally helpful and well done, and though there is a large volume of text here, the author keeps the pros flowing pretty well.

The bad news is that this is not particularly helpful for those approaching this subject for the first time. On many occasions Englander refers to "your previous programing experience" and similar presumptions about the readers technical background and knowledge level. Yes, I agree not all books are aimed beginners, but I read this text for a third year undergraduate course in IT and was often a bit baffled by the author's assumption that I was a computer programmer. Perhaps this fact says more about the lack of introductory texts available on the subject of hardware and software architecture than about this particular text, but I only found this book "fairly" helpful.

The strange thing is that I can't imagine intermediate or advanced IT student or professionals not knowing the subjects covered in this book already, and so I am left with the question "who is this text actually aimed at"?

Overall, I would rate this book as fairly helpful, but not really aimed at the readership well.

This is an excellent text for those individuals that are frustrated because they have been weaned off the Newbie texts but are unable to find a good solid intermediate text. If you have looked at the more technical engineering texts and are blown away but find the newbie texts boring for lack of detail and have to search and search for more technical detail, then this is the text for you.

The book approaches the architecture of computer hardware and software and their integration from an IT perspective instead of a highly detailed engineering one. But don't let that fool you as it has a lot of meaty technical details from more of a conceptual and descriptive fashion. Granted you may have to read and re-read some of the more technical aspects several times, but if you are diligent, you will be amazed at how much you have learned and can comprehend. For instance, how would you like to understand what a basic Assembly language programs is like? Or perhaps what is a Von Neumann Architecture? You learn this through the extremely useful and clear LMC model (little man computer) invented by Dr. Stuart Madnick at MIT and beautifully illustrated and explained in this book. By the way, the LMC model is about a little man that is in a room that has in/out baskets, calculator, mailboxes and a reset button. Through this model you will understand what an opcode is, addressing, and a computers fetch and execute cycle. You will progress from there to understand the necessity of hardware interrupts, DMA (direct memory access) and a whole lot of technical terms that you have heard of but only have a vague notion of what they are. Soon after, you will humming along into the software section to wrap it all up.

There may be better intermediate texts that I have not seen, but the texts seem to be polarized in the two extremes from my experience. If you pick up this book with the intermediate mindset and some basic background in computers and some diligence, this text will enable you to spring off into to more advanced studies.

this book is for those who know something about computer architecture and wish to put everything together and have a solid foundation on which to build their future studies or experience.
this book is not for those who do not know anything about computer architecture! however, from what some have written here, i doubt that we all have the same idea about who knows what and to what extent. for example, i m surprise to see someone writing a paper on programming and having difficulties reading this book...

Exactly what I needed. They gave what they said I would get. Very satisified with my purchase and the service.

As others have pointed out, this is definitely not a book for beginners. But what's worse is that its not very well written. The phrases and sentences are sometimes confusing. While some appear to be good examples, usually they are not well explained. I hate to be this harsh, but the book often has sentences for the sake of having sentences! I would not recommend this book to anyone other than someone who wants a quick reference of IS architecture. There are other books that do a better job of explaining this subject.

This was a required text for a computer science course I am taking. I've gone through half the book already and I get more and more confused as I go.

There are a lot of nice pictures that I assume are meant to be funny, but other than that, you're not getting much.

This book lacks clear explanations for each topic. While there is a lot of text, you'll be hard pressed to find anything you can make sense out of.

This book lacks quality examples. Though the examples it does have are helpful, there are not enough. When you get to the exercises at the end of each chapter you find that the questions seek answers to ideas that often were not covered or not covered well enough or lacked examples.

This book is so bad, there have been emails going around among almost all of my classmates, and even the professor had his 2 cents, and hopefully the course will use a different textbook for the next semester.

Don't waste your money on it!

The book is difficult to read and is definitely not aimed at beginners. Complex concepts are addressed without solid support for the lower-level concepts of which they are comprised. In effect, the book takes a complex subject, throws acronyms and abbreviated concepts at it, then moves on. Additionally, the glossary is not well-organized and the book has quite a few typographical errors.