Structured Computer Organization (5th Edition) [Hardcover]

Andrew S. Tanenbaum (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 25, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0131485210 | ISBN-13: 978-0131485211 | Edition: 5

Structured Computer Organization, specifically written for undergraduate students, is a best-selling guide that provides an accessible introduction to computer hardware and architecture. Updated content is delivered via the familiar structure that has served instructors through four successful editions. This text will also serve as a useful resource for all computer professionals and engineers who need an overview or introduction to computer architecture.

This book takes a modern structured, layered approach to understanding computer systems. It's highly accessible - and it's been thoroughly updated to reflect today's most critical new technologies and the latest developments in computer organization and architecture. Tanenbaum’s renowned writing style and painstaking research make this one of the most accessible and accurate books available, maintaining the author’s popular method of presenting a computer as a series of layers, each one built upon the ones below it, and understandable as a separate entity. A CD-ROM for assembly language programmers is available for teachers. 

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andrew S. Tanenbaum has a B.S. Degree from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently a Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he heads the Computer Systems Group. He is also Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging, an interuniversity graduate school doing research on advanced parallel, distributed, and imaging systems. Nevertheless, he is trying very hard to avoid turning into a bureaucrat.

In the past, he has done research on compilers, operating systems, networking, and local-area distributed systems. His current research focuses primarily on the design of wide-area distributed systems that scale to a billion users. These research projects have led to five books and over 85 referred papers in journals and conference proceedings.

Prof. Tanenbaum has also produced a considerable volume of software. He was the principal architect of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, a widely-used toolkit for writing portable compilers, as well as of MINIX, a small UNIX clone intended for use in student programming labs. Together with his Ph.D. students and programmers, he helped design the Amoeba distributed operating system, a high-performance microkernel-based distributed operating system. The MINIX and Amoeba systems are now available for free via the Internet..

Prof. Tanenbaum is a Fellow of the ACM, a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, winner of the 1994 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award, and winner of the 1997 ACM/SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. He is also listed in Who’s Who in the World.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 800 pages
• Publisher: Prentice Hall; 5 edition (June 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131485210
• ISBN-13: 978-0131485211
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 1.4 x 9.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #196,896 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Classical CS authors October 12, 2005

By Jorge Henrique Rogoski

Format:Hardcover

Tanenbaum is one of the CS classical authors. Any CS student or instructor should own a copy of this updated edition of Structured Computer Organization.

The book structure remains the same, but there are many important updates, mainly in the examples and case studies. Tanenbaum's style is also the same: a bit arid and telegraphic, specially for newcomers, but his approach is much better for an introductory computer organization and architecture course than the books by Patterson/Hennessy (which are mandatory reading for any CS student/instructor as well).

I have basically one criticism to this book: it is very pricey! Particularly for an instructor whose wages are not paid in dollars...

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Interpreters, Microcode, Microarchitectures, Virtual Machines April 21, 2008

By Jose Portillo

Format:Hardcover

It was back in 1987. Our computer architecture teacher presented us with the second edition of this book (1984 ed.). The book opened a new understanding on systems technology and machine sequencing for me. I even designed in paper a version of Mic1 microarchitecture to solve a problem we had with a hand held device.

This book will provide you with a good and basic background on machine sequencing and multilevel models. Use this as a base for your TCP/IP or stack communication protocol study (see my review of TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 - Implementation).

Highlights (fifth edition, 2006):

* Multilevel vision of machines (a very important basic topic), pages 2-7
* Principal metric (prefixes) units, page 46
* Bits, bytes, byte ordering on memory, pages 69-73
* Binary numbers on Apendix A and B
* Binary codes and Communication equipments, pages 117-130
* Basic transistor switching logic and logical design, chapter 3 complete
* Java virtual machine and interpreter design (beautiful description!), chapter 4 complete
* The DVD includes a graphic microarchitecture simulator and Java byte-code assembler (back in 1988 I started my own bipolar npn transistor/resistance/prototype board based Microarchitecture! but it was so large and I only complete a 4 bit ALU and 8 register data path). Now (2008) you can enjoy and program a Java version with the DVD material

In resume, this book as long as TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 - Implementation, is a good (like a toy) self learning path in machine organization and interconnection.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Long winded November 4, 2011

By Kris

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This text does a great job of explaining the fundamentals of computer architecture, however it dilutes the great explanations with hundreds of pages of case studies that are often hard to understand and in some cases not relevant to the topics of the text. I would definitely recommend that if you are just starting to learn about computer architecture look else where for something that does not dilute the fundamentals with such complicated examples. However if you are already familiar with architecture/micro-architecture you might find this to be a worth while read to learn more about how these theories are applied in many of today's modern chips, especially the Intel chip-set.