Customer Reviews

Fundamentals of Computer Organization and Architecture (Wiley Series on Parallel and Distributed Computing)

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I was hoping to find an alternative to Patterson et al.'s "Computer Organization and Design" -- mainly to get away from their constant and not-very-subtle "MIPS is better than x86" diatribe.

This book loses one star for bad editing.

It loses another star for being (in places) just plain wrong about details. The authors seem to do fine with "big picture" generalizations, but when it comes to the particulars -- watch out! This problem seems most obvious when they try to talk about the features of real-world CPUs, such as the x86 family. For example, they made a couple statements about Pentium memory management that left me wondering if they had ever read the Intel documentation. In general, their real-world examples seemed to be something that they stuck into the book in order to make it "more relevant."

So, I guess it's back to Patterson, et al.

First off, there is no such thing as "The interface between the application programs and a high level language...". They might as well have said "The interface between red construction bricks and red clay..." Those things are not distinct entities. One is made of the other. Bricks are made of clay which is shaped by a mold. Application programs are made of bits and pieces of a high level language (that is, the keywords, operators and other syntax elements that the high level language defines) which are "shaped" into the desired form by the source code that the programmer writes. They got the relationship between application programs and languages completely wrong.

At first I thought: OK, maybe these guys are just hardware types who are a little out of their element when it comes to software. That would be somewhat forgivable. Was that the case? Nope.

They proceeded to get wrong something so simple and obvious, that I wonder if any fact checking at all was done on this book. They cited the PowerPC chip as being a CISC processor, when it is actually a RISC processor. Also, they referred to it as "...the IBM and Macintosh PowerPC." The problem? Macintosh does not make the PowerPC chip, it uses it. Nevermind the fact that Macintosh is the name of a product, not of a company. It is IBM and Freescale Semiconductor (formerly known as Motorola's semiconductor division) that make the PowerPC processor chips. This is such basic stuff that even an intern fact checker/proofreader could spot it easily.

After such glaringly obvious errors -- less than 5 pages into the first chapter! -- I have no confidence at all in the ability of the authors to present the complex and sophisticated art of modern computer architecture in an accurate manner.

I am not going to waste any more of my time on this book.

I studied this book in my IT master program as a textbook for operating system course. It was easy to follow, clear, and simple. Some of other students who study some course but with another textbook they take it from me to its simply. Rich and small size easy to cary any where

i recommende it ..