Customer Reviews

Logic and Computer Design Fundamentals, Third Edition

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

The only reason I would purchase this because is because it was a required book in my school. And boy, this is some really rough reading. Let me generalize, being a techinical book and a "logic" one the authors' attempt to convey a message so garbled and mismanaged it is extermely mind numbing to read. For example, here's an excerpt from the book, "We also, however, choose to treat it first so that we can clearly justify, in terms of hardware cost, that which otherwise appears bizarre and often is accepted on faith, namely, the use of complement representations in arithmetic."
Ok that wasn't so bad right? Well think about reading a few pages. Bored yet? I feel like I'm in a middle of a sunday church service and the priest is repetiously rephrasing a sentence over, and over, and over with no meaning intended.
I belive these authors should stick to what they do best. Design circuits. They fail to explain things throughly without an emphasis WHY. Also there is too much technical garble mixed up with sentences which really should be split into paragraphs. Another thing is a hefty price tag that comes with this book.
I also forgot to mention the software. The software is designed by xilinx. I've not been able to get it to run on either my laptop, or my home pc. During lab hours at my school the schematic editor has been nothing but buggy. The software would at times erase my circuits, files wont save, etc. I find myself rewriting circuits 5 to 6 times just to rid of bugs that just seem to appear. If this book wasn't used in my classroom I'd recommend avioding it. NOt only is this book well over 100 dollars new and/or used the authors do a terrible job conveying technical data into a well formed, understandable structure we REAL humans can understand.

I have this book because it is requred for the course in computer architecture I am taking. In addition to the stuff the other guys above wrote which is all true, it has the infuriating habit of placing figures overleaf the explanation for the figures.

If this book is required for your class, PLEASE buy a different book. This book offers little to no explanation of key topics, is very poorly written, and is hard to follow. In many cases, you will be better off simply reading Wikipedia. If you go to a school that requires this book, I would advise you to write angry letters to the people who decided to use it until they submit to your whim. By choosing this book, they have ruined an entire semester of class for you. How does that make you feel?

Nothing to add, that hasn't already been said above. A horrible book to study from. Take my advice and avoid this one.

All the bad reviews are true. This book is abysmal. It's painful to read. It is horribly written. Even worse, within two months, the binding on my brand new copy fell apart. It's criminal the publisher ask $100+ for this trash. Professors need to boycott this book - FAST! Do your students a favor and use the Roth books and/or just make-up your own notes. UPDATE: To the credit of the bookstore manager where I purchased this book and the publisher, my copy was replaced with a new one after I showed them how much it had fallen apart in such a short time even with normal use.

I used a previous edition of this book when I taught digital logic several years ago and was very happy with it. Recently, I was performing an unrelated search when the reviewer ranking of this book on Amazon appeared and it was very low. This data point stimulated my curiosity so I went to the Amazon site, read a bit of the reviews and then got out my copy and looked through it.
Little has changed in the third edition; it is still a solid selection for use as a textbook in a course in digital logic for computer science majors. The coverage is generally appropriate in terms of breadth, depth and order of appearance. My only thought in that area is that the last two chapters on "Input-output and communication" and "Memory systems" are best left to courses in operating system. Which is why I would not cover them if I were to teach out of this book. A large number of exercises appear at the end of the chapters but solutions are not included in the book.
The content is not esoteric or obfuscated in any way; it consists of standard explanations of the subject matter, understandable to the person with the appropriate background and willing to read through complex subject matter.

If you can possibly avoid it, don't buy this book. If you can't possibly avoid it, remember to use the internet. The internet is 3000 times better at things than this book is.

Also, realize that even the problems in this book have continuous typos so if your TA grades you as wrong, check to make sure you are doing the same problem their solution book solved. I wish we could rate this book without a star.

Although I'm very sympathetic to the bad reviews of this text, having just used it in an undergrad course I recently completed, I think they unfairly target the book when the courses themselves are probably partly to blame.

Not to say that the 5-star review is perfectly accurate either. You'll probably find that the reason that review was so good was that since the author was 5-years lately graudated from his degree, he was reviewing material rather than learning it for the first time. Even a poor book would be useful for this.

But to my own opinions; I found the book fairly comprehensive, with detailed and complete explanations that could be followed with a little effort. Although it had a lot of diagrams, it was still fairly wordy, which is unfortunate in a technical text. It also didn't have any worked answers to the questions, except some online, which is difficult for a student to get to on a spur of the moment when they need them.

The other reviews are also correct when they say that many of the exercise questions didn't directly relate to any of the explanations in their chapters, but seemed to require knowledge of completely new material.

All in all, this could be a great text if it was twice the size, contained a lot more diagrams, contained at least some worked answers, and made sure that every exercise question was based on theory explanation that was actually present in the book. As it is, it is next to useless as a self-study guide.

What it remains extremely good for is a companion text to a course which includes contact with lecturers and tutors. If the head lecturer makes sure that any theory not covered in the book is covered in class, and chooses exercise questions that they know the students should be able to complete, and if the tutors are accessible for advice, then the text is extraordinarly good.

No offence to the other reviewers, but I suspect that if they hated the book that much, they were either students who preferred self-study to attending class, or their courses were badly structured.

This book sucks, plain and simple. DO NOT TRY TO LEARN FROM IT. They don't actually explain how to do anything and give confusing, if any, explanation of the examples. Then the back of the chapter exercises have retarded questions asking you to do stuff that they never explained how to do even. For example : "Add, subtract, and multiply the following numbers without converting to decimal." The most this was explained in the chapter is that it was possible, but never said how the freakin' hell to do it. Everything, all the fundamental concepts, are left to you, the reader, to figure out what the hell it is on your own. The most this book tells you is the names of the fundamentals.

This book is the most comprehensive book ever written on digital logic and computer fundamentals. There is no other way to put it.

I graduated with a CS degree five years ago, and we used "Structured Computer Organization" by Andrew Tanenbaum for class. I feel that the negative reviews written on this book should instead apply to Tanenbaum's.

This is the book we should have used for class in the first place. Here I am five years after graduating, and, only now, after reading this book, I am beginning to fully understand how all the internals of a digital computer work and fit together.

I have no affiliation with the authors nor am I in academia to have any reason defend it. But rather, I am defending it for the wealth of information that was put in it. This is information that is paramount to every CS and EE student/professional.

I bought this book on my own, for self development, and have read most chapters. I had no trouble following the explanations. The authors give the motivation for the study right at the beginning of each chapter, so that readers/students would look ahead and anticipate where and how the concepts and techniques will be used (and where does it apply/fit within the general purpose computer). They first give an overview and then delve into it deeper. I believe that everything should be taught that way, so that people can actually learn what was taught, especially when learning how computers tick.

I have to admit, however, that some of the concepts might be a little advanced if you are just starting to learn about computers. That's why I think that if this book is used in class at some university, it should be taught in two semesters - in order to cover everything thoroughly. There is much and too good-of-information to pass up, to cover the book only partially.

Don't get discouraged when reading this book and find that you don't understand some concepts. Find another lower level explanation to it from a different source, understand it, and then return to the book again and continue. You will find out that by doing that, going through it and learning concept by concept, you will gain an enormous amount of knowledge.