Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
dumb as a sack of hammers, weak as a bag of kittens..., April 7, 2001
By A Customer
at best, this book is a quick gloss over a small, safe subset of sparc programming. a very pricey quick gloss. at worst, this book is an exercise in futility and frustration. the author's reliance and execessive use on the m4 macro processor is enough to make one walk into oncoming traffic. none of the examples in the book are decipherable without running through the author's library of m4 macro routines - rather, the reader is presented with an indirect representation of sparc assembly that makes concepts hard to learn. the author's misdirected aims of symbolic abstractions are ok in the context of a higher-level programming language, but are absolutely worthless in the context of assembly-level programming. through this book, one is encouraged to program sparc assembly in a high-level manner similar to C - actual pragmatic and real-world assembly programming idioms are nowhere to be found. needless to say, any reader will be sorrowfully disappointed to find that m4 is about as common as leprosy in production environments. i would be beaten like a red-headed step child if i were to incorporate any of the author's practices at work. do yourself a favor and pick up the documentation at sparc.com and leave richard p. paul to nance around with the m4 processor by himself in his more aptly title book "M4, C, and Sparc Architecture"
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21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is an excellent book about SPARC Assembly Language., June 26, 1999
By A Customer
For anyone interested in learning about the SPARC Architecture/Instruction Set (and RISC machines in general) this book is invaluable. It is especially useful for optimizing iterative and decision making C/C++ constructs. In fact, if one follows the tenets espoused in this book, one can learn to hand optimize time-critical sections of C/C++ code that is better than that produced by gcc or cc - the aversion of the UNIX community to write any code in assembly language notwithstanding. The book really delivers what its rather verbose title implies. That is, a really outstanding feature of the text is the way in which the author translates the standard C/C++ constructs to their low-level counterparts. He does this in stages - creating a variety of examples that progress from functional but grossly inefficient code fragments up to superbly succinct variants. I have used this book in a one semester undergraduate course at the University of Delaware for three years and have also used excerpts from it when I have taught the MIPS Architecture. There is no other book that treats RISC (or CISC) architecture from Professor Paul's relational premise, with which I totally agree. Having taught INTEL stuff for 10+ years, I firmly believe that much of its content could be effectively utilized in CISC courses. The book is also used as the secondary text in the graduate compiler course at U.D. The book is not without flaws, most of which are because of an incredible number of typographical errors - I have counted over 60 just involving commas! Hopefully the new edition which I believe is due to be published soon will have been edited/typeset with more care. Also, there are some minor changes to the gnu software (gdb and gcc) that need to be upgraded.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Confusing, May 20, 2006
I picked up this book to familiarize myself with the SPARC architecture for an upcoming project and I was extremely disappointed in the presentation of the material, both grammatically and intuitively.
First, when learning assembly language, the last thing a reader or student needs is the code to be obfuscated by a preprocessing tool such as m4. Hiding address offsets and variable alignments in nearly impossible to decipher macros is NOT helpful. This does not make it easier to learn assembly. I found myself learning more about a tool that I'll never use after finishing this book than about SPARC assembly.
Second, whoever edited the manuscript for this book should be fired. I found myself editing the book as I read so I could understand what the author was trying to say. I also found the language to be a bit obtuse in a few, unfortunately important, places.
Third, the diagrams in the book need some serious help as well. They were almost useless. Many of them made the topic being discussed more confusing. I found myself using Wikipedia or the Sparc V8 manual more than once.
All that said, the book does try to cover the important aspects of the SPARC architecture. I did get the needed information from the book, but it could have been organized and presented much better.
The book could be a great SPARC reference and tutorial book if these problems were addressed in a future edition.
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