Customer Reviews

Computer Organization and Design, Fourth Edition: The Hardware/Software Interface (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Iown all 4 editions of this book, plus the 4 published editions (and one preliminary edition) of the related "Computer Architecture - A Quantitative Approach".

Why?

Because, every time one of these comes out, they become clear standards. The last 20 years have been a period of rapid changes in computing. Fortunately Patterson and Hennessy somehow find time to update their books about every 5 years, not only adding new material, but also improving the pedagogy and readability for different audiences.

This book offers a thoughtful combination of printed and electronic information that potential authors should study, as this combination has evolved across the various iterations.

I especially appreciate the reader's guide (page xvii), which highlights different paths through the book for different audiences. This is very important in books that cover material comprehensively, as not everyone needs to read everything, especially the first time through.

This edition is well worth having, even if one already has the earlier ones. The additional material on multiprocessors is especially crucial, given that uniprocessor performance growth has slowed, and multiprocessor software remains challenging.

I spent many years trying to get people to write software at the highest level possible, but the otherwise-desirable trend in that direction can have one unfortunate side-effect. Some younger software designers have little or no experience with computer architecture and hardware/software interface, and it is all too easy to create performance and scalability surprises that could easily be avoided.

I'd strongly recommend this book to avoid such surprises. Even if a programmer writes in very high level languages, some knowledge of the lower levels and their pitfalls goes a long way.

I used to recommend the other book to people like technology journalists, venture capitalists, and financial analysts, i.e., people who are rarely computer professionals, but need to understand computer technology and its trends. Many such have been surprised to find the book was useful to them.

However, as Patterson and Hennessy have reworked the balance of material between the two books, the more introductory material is located here, whereas the other book is more appropriate for computer designers or software people working close to the hardware.

Hence, the next time someone needs to understand computer technology, well-explained by experts, this is the book I'd recommend.

First I will mention that I had no problem with the actual content presented in the chapters. This was a textbook for my Computer Architecture class, and the figures and presentation were fine. I really like the "pitfalls & fallacies" section of each chapter, as well as the brief sections looking at how real processors apply ideas and looking at the histories of the processors. (Go ARM!)

Now, as I mentioned this was a textbook for my class, and we were often assigned problems at the end of each chapter to do as homework. These problems are the sole reason I give this book a two star. There are so many problems that are very ambiguous as to what they are asking for. Also, I don't mind having multiple parts to a problem, but they went overboard with it. You have one problem with an A and B part, then the next with A-F that you need to perform for both A and B parts of the problem before. It would be MUCH more straightforward just to make all of these sections their own individual program and it would clear up a lot of the confusion that my whole class experienced.

The kindle version doesn't come with Appendix C which is the electronic data included on a CD with the paper version of the book, it must have just been cheaper for them to produce it this way.

I'm a fourth year UCLA student studying computer engineering, and by far this has been my favorite text. It appeals both to the programmer and circuits guy in me, as well as the DIYer hardware enthusiast. It covers much of the essential computer architecture theory, but also is well supplemented with real world examples. It emphasizes design tradeoffs that real computer architects must solve. The only thing I don't like about it is the omission of some content from the hard text, but those items are provided via CD.

The book glosses over a lot of computation details for performance equations and does not provide good relevant examples in the book. The exercises at the end of every chapter are not relevant to the material covered in the book itself. The reason being is because the authors of the book were separate from the authors of the questions, which is why the questions don't mirror the book's material. I feel like the questions themselves are good questions to ask students, but the book does not adequately explain all concepts that the questions demand, because there are some nontrivial questions in there. The CD that comes with the book and the MIPS reference sheet are pretty useful though.

This book was very informative and clear. I had it as an assigned textbook for a class called Computer Organization. I really enjoyed and benefited from the way the book was laid out. Important definitions were easy to find. Examples were used a lot to make each point clear. Using the questions at the end of each chapter was the easiest way for me to study for tests.

Every now and then, however, the organization of the book would confuse me, and some of the questions were very poorly worded. I had trouble figuring out what they were asking me to do in some cases. This is certainly one of the better textbooks I've had, but it would've been greatly improved by more available solutions so that students could check their work. Now, that may be my opinion because my professor graded homework for completeness and not correctness and I was struggling to know if all my hard work was done right or not. Either way, some solutions to problems would have been very helpful.

Computer Organization and Design is an adequate text to teach you fundamentals of computer architecture and covers all the necessary material to have a basic understanding of the subject.

That being said, the examples in the text are far too specific and more general examples would have better suited the purposes of this introductory book. If you have just begun to study this subject, you may have difficulty applying the new topics because of the uselessness of the example problems scattered throughout the text.

The book itself has numerous errors and fails to fully explain topics. Sometimes it even states that this is a simple formula and the correct one will be discussed on the next page. Then never speaks of it again....

The questions at the end of the book continually ask for you to answer what it did not elaborate on, or even address at all, and are often unclear as to what it is asking for in a solution. I purchased the solutions manual just to help explain what the questions were looking for. Then to my dismay I found that many of the answers in the solutions manual were wrong according to me my teachers and other sources that I found. A few unrelated examples. The book tells you x = 1 Then asks x + y = ? using other sources you find that y is 2 but the solution manual says 1 + 2 = 9. UNACCEPTABLE!

All in all the information was easy to read but that's only because it doesn't explain anything, it merely presents the topics. This book is garbage and the writers and whoever proofed it should be ashamed.

There were many mistakes in this book...specifically in the answers provided. Our teacher used this book and specifically told us that there were mistakes in the solution guide, and he's been using all the previous revisions of this book since it was first published. He also said each edition was progressively getting worse.

My experience with this book was that it really focused on the wrong things. MIPS is no longer a dominant architecture, and although easy to use as a teaching tool, I really despised being taught architecture using a dead architecture. This book was a decent exposure to assembly language programming. As far as architectures goes though, I thought it fell short.

This is the textbook for my Computer Organization class and has been challenging to read through. It presents a lot of information but I don't feel it is presented in a very clear organized way. More like it throws a lot of information at you and you have to figure out that the three different equations it just showed you are really all the same one just with different labeling. The exercises range from easy to "what in the world are they asking me?"

Overall it feels that they are unsure who their audience is and randomly switch from easily understandable information to getting very technical and assuming that you already have a lot of background in what they are covering.