Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface [With CDROM]

I use this book as a reference in my technical writing. I recommend this book to everyone who have a basic Assembly Language programming background and want to understand everything behind the Machine Language Operation Codes decoding process. The authors build from scratch (and you learn from scratch): * How to build a complete Arithmetic and Logic (ALU) Unit - Basic Logic Gates processing - more advanced topics as Ripple Carry * How to build a complete Control Unit to guide the ALU Operation - Microprogramming vs. Hardwired Control Implementation * Assembly language examples for programming the Control Unit It is a good Technical Book in this area. Complement the study of this book with the Assembly Language Programming presented in the book "The Art of Computing Programming", Volume 1 by Donald Knuth (also, if you need more application examples of low level programming, review Volume 3 "Sorting and Searching"). This is a very good study track.

If you are a computer scientist or engineer, you must have this book. This book introduces the basic and advanced principles of computing. It gives a good background on computer systems, how it works, how it performs and how to design a system. It teaches the relationship between hardware and low level sofware. You might need to have a little background in digital design and little assembly knowlegde. It is well organized and maintains the reader's attention. It starts with simple and advances through out the chapter. Arithmetic, performance, processor design, pipelining, memory and more advanced topics are covered and explained really well. Especially if you are missing some background in any topic, you can look in to the cd that comes with the book and it has more than enough tutorial. (MIPS, Verilog, Risc architectures etc..). I can say that, its one of the best textbook I have ever had. If you want to advance yourself to next level after reading this book and understanding the concepts, then you should move on to "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" book by the same authors. It covers topics much more in depth.

If you want to understand how modern computers really work, this book is an excellent choice. The book focuses on the MIPS architecture. This is unusual, in this Intel-oriented world, but in the end, the Pentium is nothing but a RISC-computer with a complicated instruction decoder. And with the understanding you get, it will be easy to transfer your knowledge to other architectures and computers.The book makes a fantastic job of explaining how micro-processors work, how virtual memory, cache-hierarchies, and pipelining affect your programs performance, how to optimize assembly code, how circuits combine to build the arithmetical logic units inside the CPU, and the issues involved in designing and programming for multiprocessor computers and clusters. If you are a computer programmer, or beginning hardware engineer student, this book is for you. A basic course in programming would be advantageous.

This book was not an easy read for me, but if enough time is spent this book is written well enough for an assembly/hardware beginner to grasp it. I had no assembly experience and very little hardware design experience comming into this class, and using this book I was able to do very well in the class, and most importantly understand these concepts. Many people struggled(this is a CS class not EE), but most of these people simply did not put the time into reading the 100+ page chapters. Simply put the book does what its supposed to do very well if you put in the time.