Customer Reviews

Computer Architecture and Organization: An Integrated Approach

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

 

 

I was required to use this book for a course and found that, while it touched on the right topics, the explanations and diagrams were generally poorly presented and unnecessarily confusing. Honestly, I frequently found that free articles on Wikipedia were superior. Given that there are books which are routinely reviewed as being much better (Hennessey/Patterson etc.) I would strongly urge students and teachers to consider a different textbook.

Haven't got too far into the book yet, I am taking a class on Comp. Arch and this is the book for the corse. It does a great job at explaining not just what is going on inside a comp. but also Why and the history behind it.

Competent authors, updated. Perfect sense pedagogy and didactics. Results of these qualifications: book excellently structured. It presents historical events with absolute precision and well illustrated with detailed references and absolutely reliable when supported by capable and experienced organizations with a history and tradition in the development and application of information technology. Complete the table had enough indication to supplement the knowledge and understanding of IT motivating the reader to develop in bibliographic searches and experiments in laboratories.

Excellent book should be read and studied by all who want to know broadly Computer Science and / or deepen professionally and / or scientifically.

Read, study and include in your library.

President of a IT College. PhD in Computer Science

I am electrical engineer and found this book very easy to understand. The case study provided by the authors (ARC - a risc computer) is good in the way that it gives the reader the opportunity to map general concepts to a very simple machine architecture. The simulator, provided in the authors' website, is also very helpful. As negative points, I found the exercises, by end of the chapters, very easy and without any challenge for the students, moreover, there are many typos throughout the book (including diagrams). I do recomend this book, specially for beginners in the field.

If there are any readers of this review who are considering using this for a course, don't. This is the worst computer science book I have ever tried to read. The authors use a lot of undefined acronyms, terms, etc... which makes it impossible to follow the explanations. Also, there are diagram that aren't really explained. I was forced to used this book in a university course, then went to the school library to find other books. I couldn't find a book that was worse than this one. I hate to be all negative, but I honestly can't think of anything good to say about it.