Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book is an excellent introduction for those familiar with computers, but is neither for dummies nor for rocket scientists.

It is a well-balanced book suitable for both IT students and those working in the industry who want to know what goes on in PCs and system servers. The clean layout, the sequence of information presentation and the author's writing style makes this diffcult topic a joy to read about.

Some criticism - the presentation of numbers could be reduced, the appendices on logic could be expanded and a chapter on client-server architecture would be the icing on the cake. Another worthy book but a bit dry is 'Silberschatz et al.'. Check it out before you buy.

Yes, it seems to be a readable book. But what kind of crappy book contains practice questions without giving you any answers? How am I supposed to use this book to study from if I have no way of knowing that my answers to the author's questions are right?

Also, I would say that although Irv's writing style is readable it is wordy. It would be a much better book if there was a summary section following each section of each chapter. And if the damn answers were in there!

From my non-experience in computer architecture. This book shows me everything I need and more about computers. I have taken the course with Mr. Englander at Bentley College. He is a great professor and writer. Indeed he knows his stuff. He even has his own computer on display at Boston's Museum of Science.

This book is an excellent starting point for the casual user that wants (or needs) to *really* understand the internals of a modern PC. Starts from ground zero and works up to a good amount of detail. After reading this, you will know most of the jargon, what is important to performance and WHY. I found it easy to skip the topics I knew and understand the following sections.

This book would be outstanding if the questions provided as a guide would be straight forward. The author tries to confuse the reader which just confuses the concepts.

This book is only helpful for extremely young children that want to learn about basic computer architecture. There is extremely little redeeming value about this book. The explanations of basic concepts are ludicrously laughable. The title should be changed from "The Architecture of Computer Hardware and Systems Software: An Information Technology Approach" to "Watered Down Computer Architecture that is even too basic and elementary for even dummies and idiots". Any money spent on this book is better spent on a pyramid scheme.

If you want to learn about computer architecture, I would recommend: "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" by John Hennessy and David Patterson.

Required text for a computer course...very poor. I would suggest a Scott Mueller book instead. Lacked context, went into too much detail.

This book tells you a lot about the computer but the problems at the end of the chapters are very BAD. The problems really don't correlate with the text. The problems are too vauge.