Customer Reviews

Structured Computer Organization (4th Edition)

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

This well-written and often humorous (in the good sense) book is targeted for a freshman or sophomore in computer science or computer engineering. Following a few introductory chapters which give both a historical, conceptual, and structural overview of the computer, Tanenbaum partakes upon a semi-detailed introduction to the various "levels" of a computer, beginning with the digital-logic level (the actual hardware) and working up to both the operating-systems and assembly-language levels.

With respect to the digital-logic level, I thought he did well in introducing the student to the essential components (e.g. registers, ALU, Flip-Flops) without overburdening the student with design techniques such as Karnaugh maps, finite-state machines, etc..

However, by far the best part of the book seemed to be his explanation of the microarchitectural level, in which the relationship between memory, control, and datapath was fully explained. This chapter seemed to be where the "rubber met the road" in terms of showing the connection between programs and hardware. I would have preferred however if he had not introduced the IJVM language so early in this chapter, and had spent more time demonstrating microprograms. I know for a fact that many of my students seemed very confused about the difference between microinstructions and machine instructions.
Moreover, a majority of them found microprogramming with the Mic-1 very difficult if not impossible. More microprogram examples would probably have helped.

Finally, where as the later chapters on instruction sets and assembly language seemed very adequate introductory overviews, the operating-systems level seemed overly broad and of not much use. Certainly, a student should read his other book on OS to fully appreciate this all-too-important aspect of the computer.

In closing, I should mention that the Mic1 software also accompanies this text, and helps provide the student with a well-rounded education, in that they get some hands-on experience. The software and the well-written text make it an irresistable choice to use a first course in computer organization.

This is a superb introduction to modern computer architecture and is highly readable. I particularly enjoyed the running examples of the Pentium, UltraSPARC & Java VM, and the chapter on parallel computer architectures. I heartily recommend this to computer programmers who want to gain a fundamental understanding of computer architecture.

The text was required for a first year graduate course. A pretty dry read. The chapter exercises were challenging, but they required additional sources on my part (not enough info. in the book) to answer the questions. Most times I had to thoroughly reread sections to even begin to understand some of the material. Not bad, but definitely needed the blanks filled in by the instructor.

This book, probably the oldest of the Tanenbaum tetralogy, is in my opinion, the finest. This can double up as a first course in Operating Systems as well as Computer Architecture/Organization. I wish our school had used this as the textbook for our first year CO class. The material covered is fundamental yet very readable. Coverage of microprogramming(including some good stuff about x86 Micro Architecture), virtual memory, instruction set design, RISC v CISC, multicomputers. The tenet of this book is that a computer can be viewed as a series of layered machines, with chapters describing each machine. Overall a great value for anybody who wants to have a better idea of what goes under computer systems, without too much pains.

This book is in my opinion, one of the best books available on Comp. Organization. It treats the computer as a layered machine with each successive layer being isolated from the complexities of the layers underneath. Design abstraction is carried to supreme heights without sacrificing content and relevant details. In particular, chapter 4 on 'The micropragramming level' is probably the best on this subject that I've seen so far in any introductory book. I'm actually using this chapter to teach the concepts of microprogrammed control to senior BS students of Computer science. Be warned however, that if you are looking for more detailed treatment of architecture (Digital Logic), you need to buy another book to go with this one (Try the one by Morris Mano et. al.) This book compares favorably with another related book "Comp. Organization" by Hamacher et al. Together, these books can be used to effectively teach/understand the concepts of layered design. In short, I recommend this book to all beginners!

This is one of the worst textbooks I have ever read. The only reason I bought it was due to my C.S. class. However, I quickly learned to hate it. While I can understand the chapters, the questions are overly difficult and have nothing to do with real-world applications. There is no way to apply your knowledge or find out if you are inperpreting the text right.

Even with programming knowledge, this book was still hard to work with. You can do better than this one. I'll be pawning this book...

Does any one know of a solution mannual for this book? The questions at the end of the book are nice and all but they are really hard to solve.

Great price for the book....I went with the 4th edition just because I didnt want to spend $100+ for the 5th edition...hardly a difference between them....

I must say that this book is great for a self learner interested on the underlying technology in modern computers. Love the layout using layers for the explanation of computer architecture. A must read even for application programmers.

One of the most important skills of a programmer is the ability to envision what goes on at different levels of abstraction. Depending on your programming task, it may be a few levels or all the way down to the machine level if you are writing compilers. This book helps provide an excellent frame of reference for real-world programming and lets you visualize the computer as a set of levels with their individual boundaries.
The book is particularly useful for programmers working in the area of virtual machines, since it uses the picoJava(tm) architecture as case study throught the book.