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61 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Sufficient material, but strange new methods of pedagogy, December 24, 1999
This review is from: Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface (Hardcover)
This book is one of the standard textbooks for Computer Organization. However the approach of instruction taken by the authors is unconventional, and a reader might or might not find it useful. Here are the points that will be useful to prospective buyers: 1. If this book was ASSIGNED as a course requirement, have no fear. With a good instructor in class as your primary source, the book is fairly easy to understand. Besides, the exercises are well ranked in order of difficulty, and sufficiently varied across levels of difficulty. And they are usually interesting. 2. If you wish to use this as a reference work, be warned. The style is strange, and upside down in places. For example, "examples" are given with wrong usage of Assembly "instructions", because the book has not "got there yet". Later, you are given the "correct version". Some people might like this, some may not. 3. If you are a professional and want a refresher, be warned again. The book labours through pages and pages of simple worked exercises, involving nothing more complicated than a times b divided by c, and then jumps into implementational details. 4. One thing the book must be praised for is its thoroughness. 5. Essentially, the authors have intended that ANYONE not even remotely familiar with the subject should be able to tackle it from the ground up. Thus you have concepts introduced in an EXTREMELY step by step fashion, and no one will complain that the book is "difficult to read", per se. But the authors carry it a little too far, and those readers used to traditional textbook techniques of explanation, will be lost in many places. Those who have no problems with this might complain that the book is too long in places. The most satisfied reader will be one who has no idea of what computers are, and was thrown into this course all of a sudden, and who has a lot of free time, and who has an instructor to guide him through the book and the course.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great as an introduction, and good as reference material, August 4, 2002
This review is from: Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface (Hardcover)
Rather than being a boring, bland and dry text, COMPUTER ORGANIZATION & DESIGN is a well-written and very informative introduction to many hardware and software fundamentals that should be known by anyone with interest in this field. It's a little wordier than it probably could be, but I found the style of the writing to be a great help at teaching myself these sometimes obscure topics. It succeeds at being both a teacher and a reference book. The authors had the clever idea of introducing many of the concepts from a historical perspective, tracing the beginnings of ideas up to their current implementations. This makes the narrative much less dry than it could have been (let's face it, hardware design isn't exactly riveting material) but makes for a great introduction. The reader gets to see the concepts develop from simpler ideas into the more complicated set-ups of today. Putting the models into that context makes the more difficult concepts easier to grasp. Some discussion concerning this text has revolved around its wordiness. Certainly the book goes into more detail than it probably needs to, and takes longer than necessary to explain certain topics. But to the student or reader encountering these details for the first time, this approach can be extremely rewarding. I found this book to be an excellent teacher. While it took a little bit of time for me to read, it was quite up to the task of clearly and simply explaining the concepts at hand. Each chapter has a section on Fallacies and Pitfalls, which I found particularly helpful. They take a number of the most commonly held misconceptions about the material in that chapter, and clearly and carefully explain why such things aren't true. I found that a lot of what they covered were things that I had either misconstrued or was unclear about so this section was invaluable for me. As reference material, the book covers Processor Performance, Microinstructions, Arithmetic (covers binary and floating-point operations done on the MIPS processor), Processor Pipelining, I/O Interfaces, Multiprocessing, and various other MIPS related subjects. If you looking for something that's primarily reference material, you could probably find a text out there that's a bit more concise. But if you're a little rusty on some of these concepts or are encountering them for the first time, then you could do a lot worse than to teach yourself from this book.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Why teachers like this book (and students may too), August 2, 2002
This review is from: Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface (Hardcover)
Some may wonder why so many teachers, in Universities, Colleges and elsewhere, have selected this textbook among so many other choices. First, this book presents an authoritative introduction on a popular type of architecture: the MIPS architecture. As the basis for the Pentium class of systems, one can hardly avoid a good coverage of MIPS in a Computer Architecture and Design class. Secondly, the authors have taken great pains to indicate common fallacies and pitfalls as well as "real-world" examples (even though they may be slightly outdated since the writing of this book in 1995). Thirdly the book is fairly comprehensive in breadth, if not always in depth. This brings us to the real reason this textbook enjoys popularity among teachers: flexibility. Teachers often use a textbook not as a reference, but as an aide in teaching. Usually this means that the exercises, presentation and diagrams are helpful in covering a particular topic. Patterson and Hennessy provide the essentials of MIPS architecture while leaving enough room for teachers to use their own methods of presentation and emphasis. Since the book makes use of logic design but does not require it as a prerequisite (while giving a very good high-level overview in Appendix B), students from a variety of background (hardware or software) can make use of this book without being held back. A teacher may choose to cover logic design in parallel, or seperately, put more emphasis on pipelining or glossing over it, and either offer an extensive coverage of MIPS assembly or ignore it altogether This effectively allows for a wide berth in teaching possibilities. What's in it for the student? Pay careful attention to your teacher's lecture! (But you know this already) Use this book for its excellent diagrams and for its explanations if you need to understand a particular concept in more details. Use it to do the exercises of course. In the rare event that you understood completely the lecture the first time, do not hesitate to skip ahead to find "Final" diagrams and summary tables. A note on P&H's incremental method: while it may initially present some difficulty for a reader accustomed to receiving ready-made answers, it is an excellent way of understanding the design process which is inherently incremental in scope and functionality. When studying a series of diagrams (such as 5.19-5.24 or 6.31-6.35), visualize the intermediary figures as stills of a picture. The entire sequence of figures may be played in "fast-forward" to see the evolution of a design or the activities along the instruction datapath. The last figure in such a sequence may then better understood and appreciated. Last but not least, do not hesitate to read and consult other references such as Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization, MIPS reference docs available online and MIPS design companies websites. Do not forget what a Computer Architecture and Design class is all about: learning to design your own architecture one day in the real world!
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